It\u2019s one of the hottest new executive jobs in corporations around the world. The CDO Club estimates that the number of CDOs worldwide are currently doubling<\/a> each year.<\/p>\n Over the last few years, digital disruption has resulted in big changes to IT organizations.<\/p>\n After the custom-made software of the early ‘IT craftsmanship’ era, the era of ‘IT industrialization’ brought us large-scale enterprise information systems, with an emphasis on consistency and efficiency. Today\u2019s CIOs have spent most of their careers in the industrialization era.<\/p>\n But now we\u2019re in the era of Digitalization<\/a>, and IT has moved to the core of business strategy, providing continual opportunities for growth, innovation, and differentiation. Information is no longer something that helps executives make better decisions \u2014 it\u2019s now a critical part of the customer experience. And the right skills for the industrialization era are not necessarily the right ones going forward.<\/p>\n For example, we\u2019re moving from the notion of customer \u2018loyalty’ to the notion of customer \u2018royalty.’ All of us now expect the kind of treatment that was reserved for VIPs in the past. We expect our vendors to treat us as individuals, to recognize us, to know what business we\u2019ve done in the past, and to make personalized recommendations based on the current context. All of this depends heavily on existing information systems, but requires more real-time operations and more agile development cycles than in the past.<\/p>\n And information systems are now the foundation for new business models. For example, a family-owned manufacturer of air compressors is using the internet of things and predictive maintenance to switch from selling equipment to selling compressed air as a service<\/a>. And a manufacturer of next-generation forklift trucks is looking at pricing based simply on the weight of goods being lifted<\/a>.<\/p>\n The future of IT is less about servers and more about business opportunities, and some organizations have chosen to create a new executive position with this in mind.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are well-aware of the possibilities that new technology offers to differentiate from the competition, and are predicted to outspend CIOs on tech by 2017.<\/a>\u00a0But many\u00a0CMOs are hopeless\u00a0at technology. The CDO role helps bridge the innovation gap<\/a> between the CIO and the CMO: using the latest technologies to help focus on customer needs<\/a>.<\/p>\n The primary mission of the CDO is to set the pace of change rather than suffering from it. To do that, they have to ask two questions<\/a>. First, “If we wanted to completely disrupt our industry, what kind of company would we start?\u201d and second, \u201cHow do we become that company?”<\/p>\n In addition, faced with the new opportunities, many companies have implemented digital initiatives as a mess of disconnected, inconsistent, and sometimes incompatible activities. Organizations that want to become digital need someone with a holistic view of how all the initiatives come together and who can shepherd them through the change. To succeed, the CDO needs to be part leader, part bridge builder, and part evangelist.<\/p>\n First, today\u2019s CIOs have plenty on their plate coping with the changes required to technical infrastructures. Separating out the innovation role can make sure that it gets the executive priority it deserves.<\/p>\n Second, the CIOs knowledge of tried-and-true methods of performing IT \u201cbetter, faster, and cheaper\u201d may no longer be enough. Organizations are being forced to become more creative and inventive. They have to be willing to tear down the walls between different functional silos and support new ways of working, new modes of communication, and processes of continual innovation.<\/p>\n The chief challenge in digital is not technology but people. CDOs need to help break down silos and rethink the organization. It\u2019s more important for CDOs to have great \u201canalog\u201d skills such as diplomacy, creativity, empathy and change management. They have to be extraordinary people leaders: digital talent is in high demand, and they have to be magnets for the best.<\/p>\n As a result, many Chief Digital Officers in companies don’t have an IT background. Instead, they are seasoned general managers. SAP\u2019s Chief Digital Officer, Jonathan Becher<\/a>, is a great example. He was an entrepreneur at a small startup, then became Chief Marketing Officer of SAP, and now he\u2019s Chief Digital Officer, charged with creating a new direct-to-consumer business model<\/a>.<\/p>\n Clearly, there should be a tight partnership. The CDO should be able to concentrate on how to use the latest technologies to improve the customer experience, while the CIO looks after daily operations, obsesses over data governance, and finds ways to cut costs.<\/p>\n In practice, however, the roles are bound to overlap. Where does \u201coperations\u201d stop and \u201cinnovation\u201d begin? After all, the \u2018industrialization era’ of integrated ERP systems ultimately resulted in considerable customer experience benefits as well as internal efficiencies.<\/p>\n Organizations who want to innovate must\u00a0rethink their core business and operations<\/a>, not just bolt some extra technology on top. Investments in real-time systems are increasingly essential<\/a>, and will require close collaboration between the CIO and the CDO.<\/p>\n Just as the role of \u2018CIO\u2019 has meant different things to different organizations in the past, each company has to\u00a0work out how best to combine\u00a0the responsibilities of keeping today’s\u00a0business running smoothly\u00a0with preparing for the business of\u00a0the future.<\/p>\n Many believe that the CDO will ultimately be a temporary role, a short-term fix for a problem that will go away as \u201cdigital business\u201d becomes normal business \u2014 just as there are no longer any ‘Heads of e-Business\u2019 in organizations today. For example, Gartner believes that the business innovation role of IT will ultimately come back under the CIO title (potentially becoming “Chief Innovation Officer”) and that the practice of using CIO to refer only to \u2018back office\u2019 functions will decline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You have to feel sorry for Chief Information Officers. Just as they finally prove their worth to the business, a new job title turns up in the boardroom and tries to take credit for all things digital: The Chief Digital Officer or CDO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[232,246,247,248,249,251,259,382,390],"class_list":["post-12479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thoughts","tag-cdo","tag-chief-digital-officer","tag-chief-disruption-officer","tag-chief-information-officer","tag-chief-innovation-officer","tag-cio","tag-cmo","tag-digital","tag-digital-transformation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/1449311022_thumb.jpg?fit=690%2C288&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3fh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why Now?<\/h3>\n
![\"1449311022_thumb.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/1449311022_thumb.jpeg?resize=690%2C288&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhat does a CDO Actually Do?<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/1449581334_thumb.jpeg?ssl=1\")
<\/p>\nWhy a CDO rather than a CIO?<\/h3>\n
How should CIOs and CDOs work together?<\/h3>\n
What does the future hold for CDOs?<\/h3>\n