Connections, Channels, and Collaboration: New Imperatives for Today’s CIO

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

This week, I was reminded of an interesting stat that frames the current era in an interesting way.

“More people own mobile phones than toothbrushes” – Bill McDermott, SAP CEO

— Brian Vellmure (@BrianVellmure) May 14, 2012

We are indeed on a steady march towards global connectedness. Surprisingly, there is still a ways to go.

Only 32.7% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and only 17% have access via mobile device.

Connections and Collaboration

The trajectory is, however, exponentially marching towards real-time connection ability with anyone on the planet. As we gain greater capacity for connection, we are discovering dozens of new opportunities for collaboration. The implications are significant. Business models will be forced to evolve and new crowdsourcing and ad-hoc value chains will emerge.

Not only are we simply becoming more “connected”, the myriad of ways that we can connect are broadening as well – in our personal and professional lives, whether we are the customer, or whether we’re communicating with our customers. Additionally, as technology advances, we’ll be communicating with computers and machines more often, furhter adding to communications opportunities and challenges.

Next generation interactions will also include augmented reality applications and yet to be developed devices and the blending of physical and digital spaces.

In the end, all of these are simply enabling good old “Mind to Mind” and “Heart to Heart” communication. Past, current and future communication channels are simply props and mediums to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, emotions, and solutions.

What is the impact on today’s CIO?

So then, what is the organization’s role in all of this? To facilitate, support, and leverage evolving communication channels to maximize the effectiveness of every interaction, internally and externally. (The lines between internal and external will continue to blur)

A growing argument is that the mass migration to the cloud is displacing IT resources. Like many of today’s roles, those (individuals and institutions) who don’t recognize and evolve with the current realities of the marketplace will likely be displaced. However, today’s CIO and his/her respective teams have plenty of critically significant work before them.

Their focus should include the following:

(1) Educating their organizations about potential benefits of the changing IT landscape
(2) Collaborating with their Line of Business counterparts to create new value streams
(3) Architecting platforms for interoperability to ensure that ecosystem participants have the right tools to communicate in the most effective fashion
(4) Assuring compliance with regulatory requirements
(5) Linking identities across networks and channels into one unified record
(6) Extracting insights from the interactions that take place across an ever evolving myriad of channels
(7) Building predictive models, leveraging multi-channel interaction data

Building and evolving the infrastructure to enable the next generation enterprise to operate with speed, agility, and flexibility should be towards the top of every CIO’s agenda. Enhancing communication and collaboration across the ecosystem sits smack dab in the middle of that priority.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya