On June 6th, 2024, we held an award dinner at a prestigious location in central Copenhagen and announced the CIO of the Year in Denmark.
The job of a Chief Information Officer (CIO) is often a challenging one. In some organizations, the job is mostly centered around helpdesk, running Microsoft Office packages, and being a steward of antiquated systems. Sarcastic observers even renamed the role as “Careers Is Over” to reflect the legacy aspect of the job. However, a CIO also has an expanded role as organizations transform digitally with a much wider potential influence and career upside. This was well illustrated when examining the five shortlisted CIOs.
In each of the organizations of the five shortlisted CIOs, we interviewed the CEO, the CFO, and the candidate CIO themself in separate, in-depth interviews and these interviews yielded multiple interesting lessons learned.
Lesson 1: The modern, high-impact CIO reports to the CEO and is part of the executive leadership team.
Gone are the days of IT being a cost center and reporting to the CFO. All five organizations were transforming traditional businesses into digital businesses and viewed the CIO as a key enabler of overall strategic change process. These modern CIOs facilitated change by setting up ‘digital boards’ to help prioritize digital initiatives across the entire business and to ensure buy-in from non-IT stakeholders.
We also saw many examples of the CIO enabling change through educational activities involving other executive leaders, to provide them with a better understanding of what technology can do for core business activities.
Lesson 2: The successful CIO often has a dual profile that balances technical IT foundation with business acumen.
The traditional CIO often had a technical background and aimed for traditional IT goals such as system availability and reliability, issue resolution time, total IT cost, etc. but were unable to effectively contribute to digitalization of business processes.
Newer, more business savvy, CIOs have since appeared with business backgrounds, but were often not able to properly understand and control major IT initiatives due to the lack of technical understanding. Many of today’s successful CIOs have a dual background with a strong technical foundation with a business overlay (e.g. shorter business degree) or vice versa.
Lesson 3: Successful CIOs balance pragmatism with boldness
The organizations we spoke to clearly aimed to purchase standard software where possible, cloud / Software-as-a-Service solutions where possible, and to adopt out-of-the-box processes where possible. We found no desire to reinvent the wheel. However, in many cases, the organizations took a bold approach where it made business sense.
They insourced systems and application development of differentiating nature, where many iterative changes were expected. Other critical areas, such as cyber security and data management, were also managed with strong in-house expertise.
Finally, new solution areas using emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, were developed in-house and used actively to brand the organization as innovative.
Lesson 4: Instead of asking for money, new CIOs save their way to resources and credibility.
New CIOs are often met with high IT ambitions coupled with flat IT budgets at best – a difficult situation indeed. Instead of asking for new budgets, the new CIOs typically identified substantial IT savings and spent their first six to 12 months carving out savings, streamlining and consolidating contracts and employees. They then reinvested the resulting savings into new digital initiatives without having to ask the executive committee for an additional budget. In other words, they provided new services and capabilities within the existing IT budget and gained respect and reputation this way.
As more organizations use more and more technology the role of the CIO has expanded with it. CIOs have to combine both technical knowledge with business acumen to help drive their organization’s digital and IT ambitions.
IDC’s CIO of the Year 2024 Award, in Denmark
The five shortlisted organizations of the award represented diverse sectors, including insurance (TopDanmark), public sector (Danish Courts Agency), manufacturing (Finland-based consumer brand conglomerate Fiskars), membership organization (Danish Industry), and professional services (Ramboll).
Martin Wood, the CIO of Danish Courts Agency was awarded the title of CIO of the Year in Denmark. Martin heads up an IT function in a public sector agency and has managed to deliver a string of highly visible digital initiatives that are turning cumbersome legal processes digital, automated, and accessible. All projects were delivered via in-house resources (as opposed to the traditional public sector RFPs), within budget and within the allocated time. A worthy winner indeed.
If you want to know more about the CIO of the Year award, please visit the CIO event site (site in Danish).
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