CIO Classified: Season 1 Recap

Every week, we sit down with CIOs from some of the world’s top companies to uncover the strategies that have been fundamental to their skyrocketing success.

In each episode, we ask our guests which three areas of investment are so important, that they consider them uncuttable budget items. Tune into this episode to hear the budget items our CIO guests couldn’t live without!

Key Takeaways

• Your employees are key. Investing in the people in your IT department, in both compensation and training, was a major theme.
• Product was another frequently highlighted theme. Any time you as an IT department can be involved in the actual product and customer experience, you shouldn’t waste the opportunity.
• Digital transformation was also touched upon multiple times. As our CIOs pointed out, digital transformations are never fully complete and can’t be deemed completed and forgotten about.

Key Quotes

• “The area I struggle to cut the most is development, skills building, and staying fresh on technology. You have to invest in your teams, your skills, and keeping up on technology –  I can tweak a lot of other things, but I really don’t want to touch that.” – Julie Cullivan, CTO, ForeScout
• “It’s the people. Especially in times like this, it has to be the people because they’re the ones who have the institutional knowledge. They’re the ones who have been caring and feeding for everything you’re doing. All the rest you can figure out, but if you don’t have good people on board, none of it matters.” – Grant Ingersoll, CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
• “I will say training. I will fight for that. I fought for there to be more training and I will always fight when they try to cut it back, because if your team members don’t have the skills to do what you’re asking them to do, everything suffers. The business can’t be successful.” – Jonathan Reichental, Founder and CEO, Human Future, Former CIO, City of Palo Alto

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Learn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.com

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