The role of the chief information officer — or CIO as most of us know it — first came to be in the late 1980s/early 90s. It was a major milestone as it was the first recognition that IT needed to be recognised at C-level.
The role is now commonplace throughout organisations of all sizes. Many now also have a CINO, or chief innovation officer. While innovation doesn’t always happen technologically, the two tend to go hand-in-hand as business leaders look to technology to drive innovation and stay competitive.
But in a world that’s changing so rapidly through technology, is innovating enough? Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told the world in 2015 that companies need a chief disruption officer. The term is older than that — in 2014, Forbes contributor Patrick Hanlon observed that the CDO might be needed after contemplating Uber’s disruptive entry into the world, forever changing the longstanding taxi industry.
So, what is a CDO? Essentially, they are the ones who shake it up. Just when your product or service has matured to its peak, when sales are soaring and everybody is happy — that is when the CDO steps in the room and says “Right, how can we change everything about what we do?”, before driving the strategy to do just that.
It sounds like a pain, but consider what might have happened if private taxi companies had a CDO? Might they have foreseen the Uber model and got there first? Moreover, will Uber fail if it doesn’t lead the pack in driverless taxis when the technology becomes available? Look at mobile phones. Nokia and BlackBerry may have retained their leadership of that market if they had invested in the same technology behind the iPhone and others that now own that space. If the CDO gets there first, others won’t and your business remains the disrupter, not the disrupted.
It’s happening everywhere. The longstanding backbone of the datacentre, legacy three-tier IT infrastructure, is losing ground to still relatively new competitors like cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure because they’re simpler, faster, allow scalability and free up IT teams to focus on the business at hand. These competitors can’t sit still, they need to look beyond what they’ve done and find ways to increase automation and work effortlessly with the public cloud.
Some organisations recognise the need and have hired a CDO. Britain-based alternative payment and banking company Contis Group recently appointed a CDO whose role is to “map current and future customer needs across the sector; compare them with existing Contis and competitor offerings; and identify ways to disrupt the marketplace”.
Similarly, French multinational hotel group AccorHotels hired Thinault Viort, a serial entrepreneur, to take the role of chief disruption and growth officer. There are other reported examples across the world, but so far Australian boardrooms appear to be quiet and possibly reluctant about making room at the table.
It’s a tough one to get over the line, unlike CIO and CINO — it’s easy to see the benefits in creating a role that manages a company’s IT strategy, and I don’t think many would argue that innovation is positive. As well as being an overused buzzword, “disruption” has negative connotations. Employees are generally reluctant to change and having someone whose role is dedicated solely to that might lead to a stressful and unpredictable environment.
It’s easy, too, to just cash that next cheque and keep it business as usual while business is good. It takes a lot of energy and risk to be first and shake up that model.
The simple fact is change can’t be controlled and it’s happening faster than ever. Tools exist now that can help start-ups grow rapidly — crowd-funding, inexpensive marketing and advertising through social media, and using “anything-as-a-service” to seem big while still small, for example. Investors are also more willing to invest in high-potential, high-risk start-ups. This means start-ups can capitalise and capture the market from right underneath you before you have a chance. Sure, you can buy them out — Unilever spotted the burgeoning market for cost-effective male-grooming products and bought Dollar Shave Club for $1.3 billion, but that reactive play means you’re constantly starting on the backfoot.
If you’re not first, you can end up last. Organisations that can successfully disrupt themselves and the market end up on top, and it’s time Australian boardrooms wake up and inject that opportunity into their own management, not in the hands of competitors.
Matt Young is head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, Nutanix.
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