From bimodal IT to automation, demands on CIOs are growing. How can they get and stay ahead?

Running the IT department of the future will be like changing a car engine while the car is hurtling down the freeway. Enterprise IT leaders must use technology to transform the way their companies do business, but also keep existing systems running and reliable. How can they do both things smoothly and efficiently?

One thing is clear about the future: If you want to live in it, you have to invest in it. More than two-thirds of CIOs (68 percent) plan to focus their time on growth-oriented activities within three to five years, according to CIO's State of the CIO 2016 report. Increasingly, the "I" in CIO will stand for "innovation."

The CIO of the future must begin by being more customer-centric, rather than focusing on specific infrastructure components or technology products, according to Edwin van Bommel, a principal at McKinsey & Co.

A framework for innovative IT

Van Bommel has a framework for modern CIOs that he calls the three Ds: discovery, design, and delivery. Discovery involves analyzing internal detail to understand what your IT department is delivering and what customers really want. Design involves creating processes to deliver solutions that make sense to the business. "Good design is something that adds something to the life of a customer," he said during a recorded presentation entitled "Building a Fast-Moving Digital Enterprise," adding that businesses are littered with technology services that are never used because they were never relevant to the customer.

Finally, companies must measure the performance of their technology solutions and enhance them in a continuous cycle of improved delivery. This requires the development of key performance indicators that can be used to constantly benchmark performance, van Bommel concluded.

The enterprise guide to digital disruption Download the report

CIOs must engineer these changes while also maintaining existing capabilities, explains Gary Davenport, president of the CIO Association of Canada. He highlights digital transformation—the ability to change the business dramatically using a constellation of new, low-cost technologies—as the next big challenge for enterprise IT leaders. CIOs will need a refined set of skills to cope, he warns.

CIOs must wrestle with a range of new technologies, including:

They all demand the CIO's attention, because their competitors are surely exploring them. "Getting ahead involves using those technologies to make a difference to your business," Davenport says.

Agility and reliability, simultaneously

Gartner's bimodal IT model, with its focus on two streams of IT, promises to help companies explore new technologies like these while maintaining their existing capabilities, argues Stephen Abraham, CIO of the Medical Council of Canada. "All CIOs should be creating a bimodal IT organization, ensuring quality, predictability, and sustainability for mission-critical applications, but also investing in innovation, flexibility, and agility," he says.

Walking the line between innovation and stability is important. "One hundred percent predictability means zero percent innovation, and vice versa. Find the right balance for your organization," Abraham adds.

Automate for success

Automation can play a role in both sides of tomorrow's bimodal IT operation. CIOs can use automation tools to handle everyday processes, says Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State CIOs, a membership organization for state government CIOs in the U.S. These tools include:

Patch management

Change management

Desktop support

Performance monitoring

Self-provisioning

IT service management and cloud orchestration can help enterprise IT leaders automate some of these tasks. "In the past, CIOs have focused on system-centric solutions where they buy, operate, and run," he says. "In the future, it will be about contracting and managing in a hybrid world, where they maintain some infrastructure on site, but they'll move to a cloud environment."

Automation can also help with the race to a more agile, innovative environment, making collaboration between development and operations staff easier, notes Davenport. Automating this collaboration with DevOps will become an increasingly important part of the future CIO's toolkit, he says.

At one large retailer, DevOps is now part of a daily conversation, thanks to its champion, the CIO. In the past, just provisioning a server would have taken 10 different teams, according to the retailer's managers. DevOps is making these tasks far simpler: It started off as a grassroots effort in the firm, but as interest grew, it created an internal DevOps incubator called Dojo to encourage a more automated, integrated way for development and operations staff to work together. Now, it's fueling innovation projects such as a mobile savings app.

Effective enterprise IT leaders

While technology tools will no doubt be important, an effective management structure will be a crucial piece of the puzzle for CIOs. The retailer's CIO argues that in a fast-moving world where technologies evolve more rapidly than ever, an IT department won't be able to maintain stable, reliable systems all alone.

"Gone are the days when IT groups did everything and when one supplier could do everything," he says. "It's important to have a supplier management strategy to leverage their efficiencies whenever you can, and diminish the leadership time that you spend on keeping things up and running so that you can concentrate on the future."

CIOs must also build solid teams underneath them with a wide complement of skills to share an increasingly broad range of disciplines within IT, he adds. Ultimately, these preparations help IT leaders cope with what promises to be existential change.