The focus of the CIO is no longer on the 'T' of technology. Wouter Bos, former finance minister and now Partner at KPMG, in his opening plenary keynote suggested that we even might want to add another "I" – intuition. That makes six...

FIVE Level Framework of the IT Leadership Triangle

Aloys Kregting, CIO at DSM and CIO of the Year in 2011 opened  the "Mastering the 5 I's: Big Data and Beyond" Master Class by sharing his five level framework for creating value with IT in complex organizations. The five levels are: Governance, People and Organization, Master Data, Business Processes, IT Systems.

TWO Kinds of Curves

During my remarks, I shared with CIOs the fact that they seem to be always balancing between being operationally excellent regarding the current learning curve [i.e., the curve they are on] and being innovative/courageous in anticipating the curve that comes next. Thornton shared data that indicated that we have ridden the current curve just about as far as it will go.

In the plenary, I shared the story of Captain Sully Sullenberger who safely landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson river. The flight recorder tapes indicated that in the very short time span of 75 seconds Sullenberger was able to mentally "jump curves" and migrate from focusing on saving the $60 million dollar aircraft to allocating all his energy to saving the 155 passengers. The lesson here is that when the environment changes, you have to change too. The environment has changed for CIOs. The environment mandates "getting busy" with big data. The ability to extract value from data, produce insights and inform decisions and action is no longer a nice to have capability. It is a must have core competence.

FOUR Technology Disruptions

Then there are four fundamental technology changes that will "disrupt" business models. They are: Big Data, Mobility, Social Media, Cloud

And finally, FOUR Types of CIOS

Dr. Martin Mocker, Research Scientist, Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the MIT Sloan School of Management shared with attendees his research regarding four distinct types of CIOs:

Services CIO [provides IT services firm-wide and manages the IT unit and vendors]

Embedded CIO [works with non-IT colleagues, focused on strategy, business process execution and innovation, new product development and compliance]

Enterprise Process CIO [manages tasks such as sourcing, facilities, operations, shared services]

Customer CIO [works with external customers/partners to sell and provide IT-enabled products and services]

What all these numbers mean is that the role of the CIO is changing. One of the most important opportunities facing CIOs today is to embrace Big Data/Big Analytics and take the enterprise to the next level of performance.