The CIOs and IT as Enablers of Digital Transformation

Timothy Oriedo, Executive Coach and Data Scientist Strathmore Business School, timothy.oriedo@predictiveanalytics.co.ke

Last week (November 2016) I had the opportunity to give a keynote address on Big Data Role on Digital Transformation at the annual CIO summit at Enashipai in Naivasha. The main theme of the summit was on Digital Transformation. The event saw a host of CIOs and IT leaders from various companies both corporate and public converging to explore the role of IT in driving digital transformation. I was also honored to be among a panel of judges set to reward the most technological transformative company.  Largely from the contributions given by other speakers, submissions for the award considerations and from the sidelines of the summit, I gathered a particular trend, we are mostly of the mindset that innovation and transformation are technology driven.

Whereas it’s widely acknowledged that technological infrastructure does drive adoption of new fronts, it’s worth noting that the last mile of technological usage does define the successful deployment of that technology. At the intersection of lifestyle, technology and consumer is the last mile and that plays a critical role in digital transformation. Take for instance the widely held belief that Data analytics is a numbers game that adding more data points solves inaccurate algorithm outputs. Actually, no, outputs will not predict human behaviour until inputs are as complex, unexpected and sometimes as contradictory as humans themselves.

It’s important to put customers at the centre of digital transformation consideration. Customers are really the most unpredictable, the most unknown, and the most difficult-to-quantify thing for any business. Due to the explosion of digital media and increasing population of millennia’s in the consumer spending bracket, the new networked customer of today has multiple identities and is better understood when in relationship to other people.

Gartner Inc. researchers have predicted that 60% of big data projects begun this year will fail. This is because clearly, some ingredient is missing in the data analytics stew at most companies. This is explained by my observation at the summit that most of the presenters from software vendors were taking advantage of data software and IT executives now common trend of software enterprises shopping spree. Seeking a magic wand in a software tool or outside expertise will only get a company part of the way to success. At the last mile, it’s an inside job, how well they engage with the target customer.

Beyond hiring the right expert and buying the right tools organizations needs to make sure that they are creating data literacy among decision makers. The data-literate are able to tell stories. These stories may combine quantitative big data with some unquantifiable observation from real life. Rendering qualitative data into a form that can hold its own can be tricky. Social media content like tweets or venue reviews are qualitative data that may be juiced into some definite or quantitative insight. To support data literacy efforts, for example organizations can open up the user-generated reviews site awards to researchers who find innovative ways to use the data in natural language processing and sentiment analysis, among other things.

CIOs also do have a role to play in developing Data Scientist talent that can help steer the organizations towards an analytic driven business intelligence. It’s not necessary to hire a Ph.D. anthropologist skilled in studying a particular consumer base (even if he or she exits). Customer ethnography, or the qualitative analysis of customers, can be taught, individuals trained in this way need to hunker down with the data scientists and mesh their insights. The problem is as the current curricula of IT, these skills are not taught. We’re not graduating IT graduates, data scientists or ethnographers who even want to talk to each other. In fact, each side thinks the other side is useless.

This may be changing thanks to the efforts of Chief Information Officers who see the value of cross-pollinating. I see the new CIO as the cutting edge of Digital Transformation. By and large the CIOs and IT experts attending the summit clearly wanted to push the envelope on innovation with more data analytic to drive digital transformation, which was encouraging.