IT Strategy: Building Business Relevance- Kroger’s CIO did.

A solid IT strategy and the right leadership mindset are critical for success

As the pace and complexity of today’s business increases, IT has the opportunity to rise to the challenge of becoming a relevant strategic partner or be a barrier to progress. IT leaders, particularly the CIO, have a significant opportunity to become critical to meeting the needs of their evolving businesses. But this requires a new mind-set to get there.

By embracing the concept of designing and architecting for change, forward-thinking technology leaders are priming their teams for becoming highly relevant partners to the core business. How are they achieving this? They are embracing new technology, processes, and skill-sets. The end goal is to empower business users to easily and securely make changes to infrastructure to provision their own services. Using technology as an enabler, they are putting control in the hands of the businesses, while meeting security, reliability, and governance requirements. This builds inherent trust from the business and makes IT highly relevant for every strategic discussion.

The end goal is to empower business users to easily and securely make changes to infrastructure to provision their own services.

Kroger, the supermarket giant, has found the right leadership mindset in its CIO, Chris Hjelm. His formula for strategically positioning for relevance can be summed up through his four-step program:

• Earn credibility as a reliable service provider
• Learn the business profoundly well
• Develop relationships with leaders across the company
• Rely on experts, both internal and external to the organization, to help you keep up with the latest technology

Seemingly simple and straightforward, this approach requires executional excellence in bringing together the right mix of infrastructure and technology as well as process and the right people.

Read the entire article here to find out how one successful CIO became strategically relevant.

To read more about Design and Architect for Change, click here