How CIOs Moved from the Back Office to Leading Business Transformation

Robert Dixon, Former CIO of PepsiCo, and Rick Rioboli, EVP and CIO of Comcast Cable, both remember when the role of the CIO was relegated to the back office. Now, CIOs are leading critical business initiatives as more and more companies go through digital transformations. On this episode of CIO Classified, they discuss how to be successful as a CIO and build with customers in mind.

Key Takeaways

• In the early days of the role, CIOs did more order-taking than business transformation. Now, they’ve developed their role and increased their impact, moving from the back office to the forefront of customer experience thanks to digital transformation.
• CIOs need to communicate with diverse sets of internal teams from product managers, to tech incubators within an enterprise, to various engineering teams. Seeing your company from different perspectives gives you a better sense of what work is most important.
• When you’re optimizing for customer experience, don’t lose track of customer identity. One customer interaction might leverage several different cloud services. CIOs need to ensure that those systems powering that experience can track and source a user’s identity seamlessly and securely.

Key Quotes

“I’ve seen business leaders step up in technological transformation. They’re coming to the table looking at this as a way to leverage technical capabilities to create better value or new value for customers.”  – Robert 

“Don’t feel like your job is just to take orders from the business. Teams should take a step back, understand what’s important to their business, figure out how to leverage their technology in an innovative way to change things while partnering with the business.” – Rick

“When you see an opportunity to overlap what’s needed from a business perspective to create value and what’s possible with technology, you put those two things together with the right teams and that’s going to be really beneficial for your customer.” – Robert

“When we started our digital transformation, identity was at the center. It’s hard to have a digital relationship with a customer if you don’t have a digital identity of that customer. In our customer experience, that’s a key component.” – Rick

Links

Robert Dixon LinkedIn

Rick Rioboli LinkedIn

PepsiCo

Comcast

—
Thanks to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom. Modern employees demand the best tools at work. If your company wants to embrace the modern work environment, you need best of breed tools like Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom.