| | August 20168CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONYou don't really need a CIO in a "cloud-first company." Or do you? A few years ago at my previous company, I was sitting in a conference room with several executives, debating the "death of the CIO" and the need to pivot our sales team from targeting CIOs to targeting business leaders. More and more spend was happening outside of the CIO organization, particularly by Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Revenue Officers (CROs). A new way of buying technology services, the "credit card swipe," was becoming the norm. Today, it's given that cloud is enabling an unprecedented wave of technology advancement. Regardless of size or industry, the leaders of tomorrow are now working to transform their companies into software companies. To remain relevant in the marketplace, companies must embrace cloud and the digitization opportunities it enables, or risk extinction. New Relic fully embraces this view of the future and the role of cloud, from how we run our business­through SaaS rather than on-premise applications­to the services that we offer our customers. Our software analytics platform is wholly cloud-based and allows our customer to get insights into their digital business without the use of cumbersome on-premise solutions. We know from experience that betting on the cloud frees up valuable company resources to focus on innovation and differentiation versus management of often costly and complex IT infrastructure. Ultimately, it makes us more agile and scalable.What we didn't always understand, even as a company founded in the cloud, is that getting real value out of cloud applications requires more than deploying third-party SaaS solutions. To deliver against our business potential, we needed to create a strategy rooted in governance and process. Today, the role of CIO in a cloud-first world is topartner with the business to drive growth through smart technology and data solutions. The Need for Night VisionShadow IT (i.e., IT solutions implemented without explicit IT approvals) has many appealing benefits such as functional empowerment, innovation and agility. Unfortunately, the downside can be a massive proliferation of solutions that over time start to conflict, duplicate, or fail to scale. How do you leverage knowledge for "night vision" to see into those shadows without driving a huge bureaucratic process? A smart way to address this is creating holistic financial dashboards of internal and external technology spend, showing all data, regardless of who placed the order. Collectively, this can empower people like the CMO By Yvonne Wassenaar, CIO, New Relic, IncThe Role of CIO in the Cloud-First World
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