April 2015 //
The mandate for today’s CIO has changed more in the past decade than that of any other position in the business world. Previously, CIOs and IT leaders were measured on technical metrics of the infrastructure, such as uptime or utilization, but that’s no longer the case. Today, the goals of technology executives are tightly aligned with those of business leaders and corporate executives (Exhibit 1).
One of the top goals for every business leader today is to increase the level of business agility—that is, to become an organization that can respond to new opportunities or competitive threats as quickly and effectively as possible. Those organizations that are able to implement agile business processes will leapfrog their rivals. Companies that are slow to capture market shifts or to respond to the competition can become irrelevant very quickly.