CASE STUDY
intellectually‘ on board’ someone is, and no matter how much they support the end goal, adapting to new day-to-day responsibilities can still be difficult.
For teams in sales, marketing and customer success, for example, these changes affected their compensation, and that’ s deeply personal. I hadn’ t anticipated how much pushback that would create. Looking back, we should have invested more in regular conversations to make sure the whole team was still on board. Just because everyone agreed on the plan at the start of the year didn’ t guarantee we’ d still be aligned nine months on. We learned that regular, open communication is crucial when implementing big changes.
The most differentiating capability that I think is important to our success is having IT team members who understand how the business works and who can partner with stakeholders across functions to deliver real outcomes. My team contributes directly to the company’ s most important objectives by partnering with go-to-market functions, customer success and supporting functions like HR, finance and legal. Our measures of success are the same as theirs – not the traditional project completion, operational uptime and other measures that are disconnected from direct business value. To succeed here, it helps to have a few IT leaders who came from business functional backgrounds.
What qualities do you look for when building a‘ worldclass’ IT team?
How do you see the role of CIO evolving as companies accelerate cloud adoption and Digital Transformation?
IT teams need to be built to support the forward-looking strategy of the company. The leader’ s first job is to figure out what the company needs from IT over the next few years.
Of course, the common IT attributes remain important – the quality of day-to-day operations and the tools employees rely on every day need to be modern, fit-for-purpose and consistently reliable. You also need people who can innovate to improve capabilities.
You need people who can astutely manage cost and actively design ways to drive out inefficiencies. With so much of our budgets dominated by SaaS and people costs, reducing spend is harder, so you need people who take pride in finding efficiencies.
The era of CIOs as purely technologists is over. Technology has become so democratised that team members and colleagues often know more about specific tools and systems than you do. While we still spend time managing physical infrastructure, tracking laptops and scaling storage, we need to devote equal attention to anticipating the future.
At a leading tech company, in a tech role, change is constant. That’ s why one of the biggest responsibilities I carry as CIO is that of a change agent – or, as some have dubbed it, Chief Inspiration Officer. My job is to help people stay motivated to embrace change, execute it well and make the personal and emotional commitments necessary to make it stick. CIOs have a distinctive vantage point because we see how different business functions and processes interconnect to produce outcomes. At our best, we can leverage that cross-company perspective to drive initiatives that deliver exceptional results.
What emerging technologies are you most excited about for driving future customer success?
GenAI and Agentic AI have the potential to remove capacity constraints, shift productivity and make things that were unaffordable almost free. Beyond the excitement about LLMs and new application capabilities, it’ s clear that data is both the fuel and the roadblock for these solutions. They’ ll only ever be as good as the data they’ re trained on. That’ s why businesses that invest in governance, building a trusted data foundation and training their staff will be the ones to see real benefits at scale.
I’ m incredibly excited about what’ s ahead. We’ ve just launched a comprehensive strategy for Agentic AI, building on our position as the industry’ s first AI-powered cloud data management platform. We’ re helping customers discover, govern and orchestrate every AI agent they need, all grounded in trusted, enterprise-wide data and protected with enterprise-grade security.
And the applications are wide-ranging. Whatever agents a customer chooses to build, from a custom AI agent for employee onboarding, to a healthcare diagnostic agent, or even a creative agent for content generation, they can design, connect and manage multi-agent systems quickly, securely and at scale. That’ s what excites me most. x
16 www. intelligentcxo. com