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Deloitte CIO Survey: Romanian CIOs Are Shifting Gears from Trusted Operators to Business Leaders

Deloitte’s 2016-2017 Global CIO Survey has uncovered a shift in business priorities from business performance to customers as 57% of chief information officers choosing customers as their top priority.

Customers have remained the top priority for eight of the ten industries represented in the survey (business & professional services, consumer business & retail, energy & resources, government & public sector, technology & telecommunication, construction & manufacturing, education & nonprofits, financial services, health care services, travel, media, & hospitality). Forty-five percent of CIOs said their information technology organization is involved in delivering customer experience through IT capabilities and 28% of CIOs feel their IT organizations are below average in their digital skill sets.  

The survey results also show that three quarters of CIOs say aligning IT to business strategy and performance goals is the top IT capability essential to success. CIOs overwhelmingly chose strategic alignment as the top IT capability essential to their successes, followed by execution of technology projects coming in second at 55%, and vision and strategy third (nearly 50%). 

Additionally, this year’s survey found substantial gaps exist between business expectations and IT capabilities, in key areas including innovation and cybersecurity. 57% of CIOs report that the business expects them to assist in business innovation and developing new products and services, but over half state that innovation and disruption priorities currently do not exist or are in the process of being built. Similarly, 61% identify cybersecurity as a core expectation, but only 10% of CIOs report cybersecurity and IT risk management are a top business priority. 

“The Romanian CIOs are getting more involved in the strategy of their organization, working together with other business leaders to shape, refine and execute business strategy, while juggling competitive priorities and balancing cost and efficiency with revenue generation, innovation and customer imperatives. This is in line with the global trends, as CIOs are realizing that only reacting to business needs is not enough in the current rapidly changing environment,” said Bogdan Marin, Senior Manager Deloitte Consultancy.

CIO Survey Key Findings in Romania

  • More than 75% of the Romanian CIOs see themselves to become business co-creators in the future, while the majority of them are currently considering themselves only trusted operators

More than half of CIOs see their role as one providing the technical vision and evolution direction for their technical teams, motivating and retaining their teams, while ensuring an attractive (interesting projects for their teams) and safe environment (shielding them as much as possible from the office politics, yet allowing them to concentrate on technical work). 

Although ability to influence internal stakeholders is positioned as an enabler for success in the future by the majority of Romanian CIOs, the ability of comprehension of the market and the disruptive business forces does not seem to be one for future success, except for a quarter of them.

  • There are significant gaps between how CIOs perceive they are delivering value to the business and the business’ stated priorities and expectations. The most important organizational capabilities identified by the Romanian CIOs as being essential for their success are:

Alignment to business & performance goals and business engagement

Project execution and solution delivery

Innovation & disruption that is enabling business innovation through technology and identifies emerging technology to disrupt the business

15% of the Romanian CIOs are indicating that innovation & disruption capability does not exist in their organization. They are recognizing the existing gap and the significant room for improvement in these areas enabling their success.

  • 75% of the Romanian CIOs are expecting the modernization of company’s core systems will impact their business in the near future

In this context, half of the CIOs surveyed expect to replace and swap existing systems for new ones with more functionality and flexibility, a quarter to revitalize legacy systems (enhance usability/design, digital extensions to core processes, add analytics) and another quarter to upgrade underlying infrastructure. None of the Romanian respondents is considering to retire existing system and look for alternative solutions in the cloud.

With respect to business intelligence and analytics, half of the Romanian CIOs interviewed see the areas benefiting of most significant investments to be visualization, aggregation, reporting and acting on business operations data.

A third of them indicate customer data (experience, engagement, retention) and a quarter indicate large quantities of data (IoT, Big Data) through machine learning and cognitive computing.

CIO Survey was conducted during May–September 2016 across 48 countries with an aim to better understand the impact and the legacy of the CIO role. The research was conducted through in-depth interviews and online surveys. Globally, 1,217 technology leaders participated in this research across 23 industry segments. Deloitte used clustering analysis to segment the respondent population into three patterns and explored the navigation between pattern types based on business need and specific triggers for change.

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