• image description
Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of CIO

Champion Growth

01 Jun 2006

Size impacts everything. From what you do to how you do it. In organizations that are trying to accelerate growth, you and your team play a key role in providing the infrastructure and the tools to do so - nothing ensures business buy-in better than the threat of losing out on opportunity.

However, dealing with unpredictable demand and the bottlenecks that it can create, while testing a CIO's understanding of the enterprise and all of its processes, can also stretch him to breaking point given the limitations of budget, time and manpower.

Apart from calling for a shift in gears, it's imperative that CIOs take a lead in pushing a growth agenda. For one, rapid advance is guaranteed to change the dynamics of your company (and thereby your department). Second, this provides a good opportunity to change the way that your department is perceived by top management and develop from a support role to one that directly drives business strategy.

 

Scaling up provides a good opportunity to change the way that your department is perceived by your top management.

In these days, when outsourcing of many functions both core and context is a reality, what can your team evolve into? Referring to the IT organization of the future, columnist Susan Cramm says that it's instructive to study the evolution of the financial organization within the enterprise as an indicator of how IT will evolve.

Fundamentally, the roles of the two organizations are similar, and Cramm stresses that finance has figured out how to gain an increasingly more strategic, trusted adviser role while at the same time delegating day-to-day decision making and responsibility for finance throughout the organization.

This is the reason why I think CIOs should be the champions of growth in organizations, more so than even the folks in sales or marketing. That's the key to getting out of being backroom boys and playing a more tactical role.