Computerworld, Australia: Cognizant’s APAC Head Says CIOs Must Set Clear KPIs and Define Success Upfront to Ride the Wave of Digital Change

“CIOs are facing ever-increasing challenges as IT begins to take center stage in virtually every modern business,” writes Jayajyoti Sengupta. “With a recent study finding digital has the potential to add between $140 and $250 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2025, businesses that wish to remain competitive must look beyond digital strategy and work at becoming digital companies at their core.” Excerpts:

“CIOs need to stop seeing themselves as technology managers and move towards becoming business leaders. Setting clear KPIs and defining success upfront will enable CIOs to ride this wave of change in the best way.

Businesses invest in digital transformation to create wider business success and value. But digital transformation can’t be considered a success until clear KPIs are set. Businesses are past the stage where monetary investment in technology automatically equals digital transformation. The list of KPIs needn’t be exhaustive, but should get to the point of what business leaders and CIOs must look for in the long term to determine success.

Digitally-focused KPIs such as process efficiencies are important because they deliberately avoid measuring success against statistics such as clicks or electronic payments. As these measures are merely a means to an end, measurement against key benchmarks provides a more demonstrative indicator of how technological investment impacts businesses as a whole.

As Artificial Intelligence and robotic process automation become more mainstream, the future of employability of existing workers comes into question. In order to address this imbalance, companies should invest equal amounts in digital transformation as in digital training.

Considering Australia’s ageing population, CIOs need to react accordingly and work to engage employees and talent from across four generations, from baby boomers to Millennials.

Maintaining people skills should be of the utmost importance for business leaders, particularly as an attitude of fearmongering about automation taking over peoples’ jobs permeates everyday discussion.

Talent management must keep up with the pace of change, and business leaders need to ensure they reprioritize talent as a core component of digital strategy. Businesses need to consider new ways of reaching out to talent such as encouraging university internships, crowdsourcing and considering customers, citizens, vendors and partners as extensions and digital accelerators of the talent platform.”

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