| | July 201619CIOReviewThe Digital CIO's Survival HandbookBy Dr. Leda Glyptis, Director, Sapient Global Marketsou would think that, on `planet digital' where all banks are heading, the CIO is king. And yet it doesn't feel that way from within the CIO's office.Although undeniably the IT department has come up from the literal and organizational basement (and I should know having made that figurative and literal journey myself), the CIO is under more pressure than ever to square circles and pull rabbits out of hats.Firstly, the CIO needs to manage what he builds with. Although the complex legacy infrastructure, existing capabilities and architecture are neither his choice nor his doing, they are both his problem and his domain. They need to be managed, kept `on' at great cost and heartache and ­ adding insult to injury ­ the CIO's leadership team have to defend that fact in meetings with the business, each day, as if everyone had forgotten how these systems got there in the first place.Meanwhile, with every passing day, legacy infrastructure gets more expensive, budgets get more constrained, teams get more geographically disparate and more heavily matrixed in the pursuit of operating leverage if not efficiency. The CIO needs to magic solutions, manage partners who, in the name of cost, may be holding key pieces of the efficiency puzzle and, naturally, he needs to have answers. For everything: from on-boarding to Blockchain and billing to Big Data. He needs to answer and do everything, while going Agile, rolling out design thinking and reducing headcount. Secondly, the CIO needs to manage who he is building for: the business. This is an unwilling customer and the CIO needs to justify spend allocation to people who often don't understand the specifics or bring a complex history of mistrust that has nothing to do with individuals and everything to do with institutional memory.So what should be a business discussion about relevance, profitability, operational alignment and the technology to support it becomes a discussion about budgets for systems for businesses whose customers don't enter this equation.Dr. Leda GlyptisBut essentially the advent of the digital era removes friction, the in-between steps and processes that existed because there was no better wayCXO INSIGHTSY
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