Role of CIOs in the Era of Connection

Role of CIOs in the
Era of Connection
Innovating America’s Future

The Role of CEOs in the Era of Connection: Innovating America’s Future 2
3 Executive Summary
4 Customer-centric innovation
5 CIO: What is the Chief Information Officer?
7 AEC/O big data opportunities
8 Responding to the new AEC/O digital business landscape
10 Fighting tomorrow’s war with yesterday’s lessons and attitudes
12 CIOs in the era of connection—connecting big data to business strategy
12 Final summary and key takeaways
14 Appendix A – CIO Survey results
Contents

3
Executive Summary
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) will face dramatic changes
in the next five to seven years, as architecture, engineering,
and construction and owner-operated (AEC/O) firms come to grip
with the massive amounts of information being generated by all
things digital. They will face new technology, redefined business
processes, and shifting customer demands, both internally and
externally. Leading this evolution will be critical, as CIOs are the key
company decision makers and leaders within AEC/O firms, deter-
mining the success of a firm’s growth and business strategies by
understanding the intersection of information and business value.
Role of CIOs in the Era of Connection
Innovating America’s Future
CIOs cannot ignore the major issues
facing them in today’s business climate:
customer-centric innovation; a new “era
of connection”; big data; and fighting
tomorrow’s business wars with today’s
technologies. The next industrial revolu-
tion will be a “connected era” where
big data, created by connected devices,
power decision-making, and above all -
strategy. This generation, who are both
users and customers, will share and use
this information as normal currency and
expect those who provide services to
them to work in a similar manner. The
era of connection will be vastly different
from previous generations—when many
AEC firms were educated and trained to
provide services. Half of this new 86+
million generation doesn’t own a vehicle
and over 60 percent are urbanites.
Imagine the impact to the configuration
of our cities.
The results of our survey of CIOs
of major AEC/O firms are telling, and
the need for action is apparent: 62
percent of survey respondents stated
the biggest challenge going forward is
outdated tools and technology. But with
75 percent focusing budgets on busi-
ness as usual, the case to make new,
key technology investments for innova-
tion and business differentiation must
be made. How will CIOs not just cope
with, but capitalize on, these changing
times? To better understand this pending
transition and companies’ areas of focus,
we collected insight from AEC/O CIOs.
The results of that survey are intended to
identify what CIOs need to do business
wide over the next several years, not just
to stay relevant but to lead in this era of
big data. Following are responses to the
survey and outcomes of the CIO sympo-
sium where these issues were discussed.

Customer-centric innovation
The intersection of information and
business value is becoming a critical area
for CIOs as the business world comes
to grip with the massive amounts of in-
formation being generated by all things
digital. CIOs (both public and private)
will be faced with profuse changes in
technology and business processes in
the next five to seven years: BIM and its
future; 50–75 billion connected devices;
the future of project management;
shifting O&M data strategies; changes
in how things are made; and the impact
of cloud, mobile, social, and big data
on firms’ future and current business
strategies. Understanding how CIOs will
address these issues is a critical step in
all AEC/O firms’ business strategies, as
the role of the CIO as a key company
decision maker rises in importance and
influence.
As discussed in the book The Age
Curve: How to Profit from the Coming
Demographic Storm by Kenneth
Gronbach, each product and service
has a “best customer” that sustains a
business. And the built environment
industrial revolution will be a “connected
era” where big data, created by con-
nected devices, powers the Gen Y, who
will share and use this information as
normal currency and expect those who
provide services to them to work in a
similar manner. It will be vastly different
than that of previous generations, when
many providing firms were educated
and trained to provide services. The new
Gen Y professionals think differently—
their opinions on social, economic, and
environmental issues are different, and
that will influence our future. With more
of this generation living in urban centers
(60–70 percent), their influence will
shape the mobility requirements of those
cities for coming decades.
Our CIO survey aims to identify areas
of focus and create near-term goals to
help CIOs stay relevant in the industry
(without being run over by big data). This
report includes the responses to the sur-
vey and the outcomes of the CIO survey
symposium where these were discussed.
serviced by AEC/O professionals is no dif-
ferent. CIOs will be a key contributor to
deciding what technology is needed to
collect the information and knowledge
to make this shift, while ensuring data
security. CIO’s are standing on a gold
mine, but are so distracted by security
that it is incredibly difficult for them to
grasp the opportunity, let alone grab
the influence within their firms that they
need to have. The upcoming Generation
Y (echo-boomers) are the largest genera-
tion in history—some 86+ million—thus
dwarfing the last large generation, the
baby boomers at 78 million. Today’s Gen
X are only 69 million strong.
With the much smaller Generation X
(many of us) coming to our end of the
buying cycle like the baby boomers
before us, dramatic shifts are pending
in our built environment and what is
important, what it looks like, and what
we prioritize. It will be Gen Y and their
ideas that will shape our future, just
as the baby boomers shaped it dur-
ing our industrial revolution. This next
“It will be Gen Y and their
ideas that will shape our
future, just as the baby
boomers shaped it during
our industrial revolution.”

CIO: What is the
Chief Information Officer?
The responsibilities of the CIO are
changing. According to the survey
results and the discussion that followed
during the symposium, a chasm exists
between their traditional tech focus
and the coming leadership role that
will be required of them—one that
goes beyond IT to business develop-
ment and strategy. This leadership role,
one that gathers, handles, distributes,
interprets, and makes decisions about
information, is going to be powerful in
driving future strategy.
As CIOs get more involved in strategy
and business development, they must
balance this new area of responsibility
with that of the traditional IT execu-
tive role, without stifling innovation.
However, when “the lights go out”
or data is breached, they still have to
be on top of their historical IT func-
tion. This leads to a broader ques-
tion: In today’s data-centric era, do
we need a new “C” title—a CSO, or
Chief Security Officer? The discussion
focused on the fact that the role of the
CIO has changed fundamentally in this
era where security is more than bits
and bytes, it is both critical and truly
something else—a pathway into a firm,
or clients’ secrets that need to be 100
percent protected, day and night.
Survey responses were noticeably
light on the value of social media or
SMAC in general (social media, mobili-
zation, analytics, and cloud) in a CIO’s
strategy. With 90 percent of project
overruns coming from non-communi-
cation of non-agreement (that is, failed
discussions among stakeholders) this
statistic resonated with attendees as an
area that is low-hanging fruit for SMAC
to address and improve. Building and
implementing a social network success-
fully requires buy-in, commitment, and
participation of corporate leadership
at its highest levels. But the effort of
crowdsourcing information from across
the company can increase harmonization
of internal communication and help
create a culture of sharing.
In 1996, a federal law that made IT
a priority in the federal government
and mandated agencies to create the
CIO position truly changed the game in
raising the status of the CIO to a C-level
executive. The corporate world took
note and followed suit. Originally, the
CIO was under the purview of the CFO,
as the power of controlling the technol-
ogy budget made the CIO defer major
decisions until the CFO signed off. More
recently, this has changed in many
innovative firms as the role of informa-
tion (versus just IT budget) is rising in
importance in all strategic decisions
and is now required for sound business
strategy. This shift, however, requires
that key priorities must be addressed
to ensure the CIO as a visionary type of
leader versus someone who runs the
day-to-day. Respondents stated that it
takes the complete support and buy-in
of the CEO, who views information at
all levels, to transform a company’s
business model and the objective of
the CIO.
It is critical to know that the mission
of the CIO is still grounded in its origins
from 1996. What was important in the
‘90s is just as important today, but with
more sophisticated tools. Priorities back
“It is critical to know that
the mission of the CIO
is still grounded in its
origins from 1996. What
was important in the
‘90s is just as important
today, but with more
sophisticated tools.”

then included customer satisfaction,
employee engagement, and security
of employees and of internal systems;
those priorities have not changed. CIOs
need to understand the needs of the
company, and for that they need to
know the needs of customers, both
internal and external. What role does
(or can) technology play in getting
what the customers want? How to get
that message back to the leaders of
the company is crucial to understand
as the pace of technology increases.
The biorhythmic cycle of the informa-
tion technology realm is often 10 times
faster than in the AEC/O space, so
keeping pace can be challenging.
Attendee discussion at the symposium
around employee engagement and its
connection to customer satisfaction
revealed one of the ways to keep pace:
use internet protocol (IP) that exists
within the company—not IP in the
sense of technology, but IP in the sense
of employees. While this strategy may
be obvious to some firms, it is clear in
the discussion of the CIO survey at the
symposium that responses to the survey
(Appendix, page 20/chart 1) were
noticeably light on the value of social
media or SMAC in general.
CIOs stated the focus on another
“I”—as in “Internal” relationships within
companies—is certainly important and
the platform for building those relation-
ships needs to be broad enough to cap-
ture the breadth of the human experi-
ence in those relationships. However, if
successfully done, that platform allows
for not only better internal commu-
nication through open sharing and a
sense of community regardless of place
or seniority in the organization, but a
company that can better respond to
the changing and challenging needs of
their clients by utilizing all employees to
tackle a client project and challenges,
not just the select few project man-
ager/client agents. This crowdsourced
company approach enables information
to be used to drive innovation both
internally and externally, and the CIO
is best executive positioned to make
this happen.
believe their top business priority
in the next 18–24 months is
strategy transformation to new
business models.
2015 cio survey
44%

AEC/O big data opportunities
As we know, the intersection of informa-
tion and business value is becoming a
critical role for CIOs in the age of big
data. But with this knowledge comes
the question of what or where the
opportunities are. In discussion with
CIOs about the one recommendation
they would pass along to peers in order
to understand the opportunities to use
big data to create value (e.g., innovate),
the following suggestions were made:
• Give a human face to big data
Integrate people into big data plat-
forms by including features that organi-
cally generate engagement (which can
be utilized for work benefits) rather than
by promoting the platform directly as a
purely professional tool. This reinforced
the fact highlighted from the survey that
building and implementing a social net-
work successfully requires buy-in, com-
mitment, and participation and putting a
human face on big data helps to accom-
plish this. And crowdsourcing information
from across the company helps increase
harmonization of internal communication
and create a culture of sharing.
• Create a case study
A case study (or studies) with dem-
onstration projects including industry-
backed research could help motivate
others. Building a team with appropri-
ate risk tolerance to try an innovative
approach—or mitigating the risk to
individual enterprises by aggregating it at
an industry level— means the team can
undertake a project that explores a specific
context and generates a concrete/tan-
gible result that can be shared. For
example, projects might look at sources
of big data, how those sources of data
can be used in innovative ways, and
what unrelated/unanticipated insights
emerge from the exercise.
• Intersection of big data and the finan-
cial bottom line
Because CEOs and executives are often
preoccupied with saving money or mak-
ing new money based on advantages
uncovered by analysis on profit, focus
on identifying opportunities in big data
with a financial bottom line perspective
in mind. Identify lessons learned and best
path forward and document these as
supporting business case metrics to apply
in a wider fashion across the company.
• Appoint a “Chief Librarian”
For AEC/O enterprises, especially
large companies, someone needs to dig
through and identify the range of data
sources, organize the information, and
develop approaches to curating it so
useful insights can be extracted. It will
be incredibly useful to have a dedicated
“Chief Librarian” to lead the charge to
uncover and knock off what is valuable
to your industry. A case in point was
“Building and implementing a social network successfully
requires buy-in, commitment, and participation and putting
a human face on big data helps to accomplish this.”
“ Because CEOs and
executives are often
preoccupied with
saving money or
making new money
based on advantages
uncovered by analysis
on profit, focus on
identifying opportunities
in big data with a
financial bottom line
perspective in mind.”

discussed. One development company
did an analysis of all their project design
documents sitting on a server and dis-
covered that they had used over 12,000
different types of walls over the past 10
years. This was driving up their costs,
and steps could now be taken to reduce
reinventing each project. This issue
never would have come to light without
looking at a large range of data sources.
Responding to the new AEC/O
digital business landscape
The pressures to focus on the right way
to increase our built environment—by
taking into account new processes
that use the power of the cloud both
computationally and collaboratively—set
the context for creating strategies to
answer the big challenges demanded of
our generation. Given today’s onslaught
of information, CIOs need to know what
kind of data to collect, how to package
and share that data within a firm, and
how to use this knowledge to influence
the firm’s future strategy leads to
understand where new business
opportunities lie.
It is clear that success varies by firm
size and service industry, but it starts
with the vision set out by the CEO using
the business and data insight of the CIO.
Big data is a phrase most commonly
associated with the finance and retail
sectors, but now for the first time in the
history of AEC, we are starting to capture
large amounts of highly trustworthy
information using Building Information
Modeling (BIM) technology and related
systems. The question is, what might
A/E/C/O organizations do with such
capabilities?
Today’s decisions can no longer be
made in silos, with limited insight. The
good news is that this explosion in digital
content is proving to be a stimulant for
innovation, to remove traditional barriers
and shift to outcome-based approaches
in order to deliver the highest lifecycle
return versus lowest lifecycle cost of the
built environment. And that’s poised to
change the way we all think about, plan,
design, build, finance, operate, and
maintain our built environment.
Using big data analytics to drive down
the number of mistakes made in the real
world, in everything from asset design
to operations and maintenance, is key;
it’s far cheaper to get it wrong virtu-
ally than in reality. The phrase “if only”
should disappear from the lexicon of
project planning, design, and delivery—
think of the boost this could deliver to
your productivity. The not-so-obvious
is what such an environment might do
for responding to the boom-and-bust
effect on the talent pool. How do you
get people up-to-speed quickly? Might
such environments provide an alternative
way to accelerate new recruits through
the process of acquiring knowledge and
being industry-wise by ‘learning in the
context of the real world’?
“Big data is a phrase most
commonly associated with
the finance and retail
sectors, but now for the
first time in the history
of AEC, we are starting
to capture large amounts
of highly trustworthy
information using Building
Information Modeling (BIM)
technology and related
systems.”

In the Making the Grade Report, 45
AEC/O companies got together to talk
about how, as a national imperative, we
promote regaining America’s infrastruc-
ture leadership through a renewed com-
mitment to infrastructure development,
both civil and social, for the long term.
It is a high-level strategy, and a starting
point to rekindle the foresight, initiative,
investment, innovation, and hard labor
that went into developing a national
public infrastructure that has served as
the foundation for economic expansion,
prosperity, and opportunity for succes-
sive generations of Americans. Part of
accomplishing this goal is using informa-
tion and knowledge to deliver on the
promise of what big data could provide
for that process. Now is the time for us
to define what big data means, not to
finance or IT, but to the A/E/C profession-
als and firms who are the ones to deliver
our future built environment.
CIOs stated the data boom represents
an opportunity to completely transform
how firms design, construct, and operate
buildings and infrastructure. While most
agreed with this, the survey showed only
42 percent use big data always or even
sometimes in planning of business and
customer strategy. The remaining 58
percent use it seldom, if at all.
In discussions, some of this lack of
using big data comes from the fact that
with anything new there are barriers that
must be overcome. Issues like interoper-
ability, reliability, and accuracy of the
data, and—of course, of prime concern
to a CIO—privacy and security. Beyond
the internal view, the external view must
be taken into account. Some CIOs noted
that it’s a trust factor for the most part.
Consultancies using data for customer
strategies in particular, like data-driven
planning, design, or operations, may
require their client to open its data books
or allow greater access to its employees
or its customers for feedback. If this
is a public client, the sensitivity can be
tenfold.
Even with this required change and
concern around security, there was
consensus with many on some aspects
of what big data means to AEC/O
organizations. It was agreed that big
data is only useful when it can:
• Be converted into knowledge
• Combine analyses of different sources
of big data, leading to better decisions
• Produce actionable intelligence, mak-
ing connections and patterns that you
would not have otherwise have made
• Lead to new business and client
opportunities
It is critically important for firms
to have an overall strategy for big
data—but how and what are the tough
questions. The executive branches of
many firms want to see technology as a
commodity, but this is focused on the old
way and will not drive the innovation op-
portunities previously discussed. It has to
be connected to new opportunities and/
or streams of revenue from outside or re-
duction of costs and operating expenses
inside. A case in point: imagine being
able to sell information about everything
from rivets to optimal structural construc-
tion approaches based on size, risk, and
cost from a thousand-odd projects to
potential developers? As this new age
of connection arrives, the distinction in
products changes, and firms are now
A National Six-Point Plan
to Regain America’s
Infrastructure Leadership
”Never doubt that a small group of committed
people can change the world. It is the only
thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead, Anthropologist
Making
the Grade
Report Out
Making the Grade Report: A National
Six-Point Plan to Regain America’s Infrastructure
Leadership. Download whitepaper.

giving technology and innovations (IP)
away so that they become advertising
and marketing, positioning these firms as
thought leaders and innovators.
Big data in decision making involves
first securing a commitment within a
company’s internal teams and then
with external customers, partners, or
organizations, then working as a holistic
team, reinventing internal and external
processes in order to organize behavior
to this new approach. This skill set is
not new to many CIOs, but few have
exercised those muscles to such a wide
potential audience.
Fighting tomorrow’s war with
yesterday’s lessons and attitudes
How do we handle real-time analytics,
social media analysis, growing volumes
of video, and staggering volumes of big
data assets? How is an explosion of digi-
tal content driven by 50–75B connected
devices changing everything we know
about how everything is made? Under-
standing these questions and ensuring
current tools and technology can handle
the answers will unlock the potential to
drive future strategy and business model
transformation.
CIOs have always considered keeping
the company—and, by extension, its
data—safe as the top priority. A state-
ment often quoted by CIOs is “You’ve
either been hacked already, or you just
don’t know it yet.” In today’s world this
is an unfortunate but true statement,
and with the upcoming deluge of con-
nected devices by 2020 (the 50–75B),
there will be many more potential
points of entry (or sources of leaks) to
be secured. With the main concern of
security aside, 63 percent of the CIOs
who responded to the survey indicated
that they see modernization/innovation
as their top priority, with cyber security
coming in second at 13 percent. Clearly,
this shows a forward direction; CIOs
understand that securing their company
and client data is paramount, and they
have a good understanding of how to do
that. The next step is to harness and use
that information for business innovation
and to modernize how they drive new
business and business models.
We are on the brink of the biggest
change in civil and social infrastructure
since the industrial revolution. Technology
is rapidly changing how all AEC/O firms
design and make things. Additionally, 56
percent of the surveyed CIOs noted capital-
izing on internal data as the area in which
they see the greatest potential for produc-
tivity growth. Some of these opportunities
that can innovate processes by capitalizing
on internal data include:
• Using cloud computing to access vast
amounts of processing power on de-
mand—the so-called “infinite comput-
ing”—so that even the most complex
analytical challenges will become routine,
so that eventually a design or commercial
change can be seen in near real time.
• Using infinite computing to automati-
cally explore the infinite range of design
possibilities and land on the “best”
solution—a process called “generative
design”—enabling us to generate ideas
from algorithms, and to analyze intercon-
nected solution sets to improve building
performance and infrastructure strategies
to envision buildings and infrastructure
that can better meet client and society’s
needs and be constructed efficiently
and effectively.
“We are on the brink of the
biggest change in civil and
social infrastructure since
the industrial revolution.
Technology is rapidly
changing how all AEC/O
firms design and
make things.”
agree that
modernization
/innovation
is the top
priority.
2015 cio
survey
63%

• Searching for patterns horizontally
across your portfolio of projects, or
vertically through your historical proj-
ects, together with other data sources
in order to identify everything from
early signs of stress in your supply
chain, to better strategies for material
hedging, to the best way to optimize
cash flow, to the root cause for overes-
timation in your bids.
CIOs noted there is much that can
be learned by using the vast amount of
information contained in their project
files (Appendix A, page 13/chart 2). They
also agreed that new technologies and
processes have evolved for the design,
engineering, construction, operations,
and maintenance of our built environ-
ment that are superior to previous ways.
These new technologies and processes
help us approach the built environ-
ment as integrated, networked “smart”
systems rather than isolated building and
engineering projects.
With 62 percent of survey respondents
stating the biggest challenge going for-
ward is outdated tools and technology,
it is clear that the methods, standards,
and approaches that have served AEC/O
firms well for many decades are now
becoming outmoded and can actually
stifle innovation in developing future
buildings and infrastructure that can
ultimately save money and time and
improve public outcomes. The following
list is not exhaustive, but it illustrates the
issues that require equal participation
and commitment by companies and their
clients, including government agencies at
the federal, state, and local levels:
• Siloed people, workflows, applications,
and processes that cause redundancy,
reduce productivity, and result in
information conflicts and increased
project costs
• Limited private investment in public
infrastructure projects due to a track
record of inconsistent performance
in meeting project time/budget goals
and a lack of transparency about the
project pipeline process
• Increasing data from smart technologies
overwhelming our current infrastructure
systems and, with no funding to
address it, preventing the
extraction and application of the
newest and most valuable
“56 percent of the surveyed CIOs noted capitalizing on
internal data as the area in which they see the greatest
potential for productivity growth.”
“The methods, standards,
and approaches that have
served AEC/O firms well
for many decades are
now becoming outmoded
and can actually stifle
innovation in developing
future buildings and
infrastructure that can
ultimately save money
and time and improve
public outcomes.”
Internet-based technologies
• Equally important, public policies at all
levels of government that lock-in out-
moded approaches to overall project
delivery, including design and
engineering, construction, as well
as asset management of public
infrastructure projects
The three key areas that emerged

from this discussion were security; internal
data mining; and updating tools
and technology.
In an increasingly connected world,
economic imperatives and resiliency im-
peratives are coming together. Leaders in
the AEC/O industry, including CIOs, have
spent much time thinking about how
innovative strategies in planning, design,
and maintaining the asset can develop
modern, resilient buildings and infrastruc-
ture. Already, advanced technologies are
available across the entire spectrum of
development―from the opportunities
big data provides to analyze more com-
plex risks and problems to avoid wasting
time and money, to BIM processes that
can stretch investment dollars through-
out the design and construction phases,
along with introducing predictive asset
management approaches to prolong the
asset life once built.
CIOs in the era of connection—
connecting big data to
business strategy
It is clear from listening to the CIOs’
discussions and from the responses to
the survey questions that connecting big
data to their business strategy is key to
success. And we must make sure that
this process has a “human face” to it:
big data must be useful and invite use,
acceptance, open collaboration, and
knowledge sharing, internally as well as
externally, so it can foster innovations
in client projects. Today all manner of
things interconnect and relate to each
other and other systems, both physically
and digitally. We are on the brink of
the biggest change since the industrial
revolution. These changes are not only
dramatic, but they are happening fast.
More changes are coming in the next
decade than many have experienced in
their entire lifetime, and the CIO is right
in the middle of these changes—and in
some ways in the driver’s seat.
CIOs must look at big data operating
across three axes: business data opera-
tions; project and engineering disciplines;
and external reference data of clients.
In this coming era of connection, the
internal operations of what a CIO does
remain the same, namely keep the
lights on and the costs down while
executing on a business strategy that
connects and balances the needs of
different departments.
The objective, of course, is to keep
the business relevant by constantly
improving. More and more, CIOs will be
experiencing expanded external facing
roles and responsibilities. These include
client facing, managing relationships, and
managing competitiveness by innovating.
For CIOs to really hit their stride in leading
this change during the era of connection,
as a group they need to start building
discipline about what sources of data are
relevant and how they perceive buckets of
information and what they relate to, and
connect all of the data sources to find
out what value/meaning is out there to
be utilized.
Final summary and key takeaways
The availability of large amounts of
data and computing power (the cloud)
means you can find expertise virtually
and no longer physically, leading to
the emergence of younger, lighter,
nimbler competitors that can do things
more quickly than their incumbents.
This business transition is from inside
to outside, where some of the best
CIOs now come from the operations
side instead of the technical side of
businesses—a fact that demonstrates
“It is clear from listening
to the CIOs’ discussions
and from the responses to
the survey questions that
connecting big data to
their business strategy is
key to success.”

the expanded role expected of CIOs. The
ability to use the cloud infrastructure
and big data will you give you a short-
term competitive advantage over those
that don’t. It will be brief, however.
While more must be figured out, here
are some of the initial takeaways, and
initial best practices, from CIOs that are
good starting points to enter this era of
connection and help connect big data to
business strategy:
• Aggregating data and making the
correlations—it’s the key to big data
• Emphasis on the social aspect of
social media: humanizing colleagues
as crowdsource contributors beyond
their designated role
• Gamification—the use of game
technology to drive collaboration,
to encourage people to buy into the
system and engage
• Strategic big data priorities backed
by and originating with the CEO but
driven by the CIO
• Engagement not determined as much
by the platform or the technology so
much as the culture
• Skills search—find similarities with
clients, coworkers, and teams and
map that talent
• Generalizing demographics: In most
enterprises today, deep technologi-
cal sophistication is a characteristic of
younger generations, yet these young
people are nowhere near the CEO or
boardroom. Look at ways organizations
can work to fully grasp the opportuni-
ties of these internal “technologists”
when developing strategy and
high-level decisions.
• Take old structure and apply it to
new technology to speed integra-
tion and adaptation. For example,
BYOT started as “bring your own
telephone,” changed into “bring your
own tablet,” and now is evolving into
“bring your own laptop” for certain
staff. This paradigm is enabled by
the cloud. The organization can use
existing trends as a way to mitigate
the costs/impact of rapid techno-
logical obsolescence; under a “bring
your own” paradigm, the enterprise
avoids procuring successive waves of
hardware that become obsolete in a
very short time, while extracting value
from the devices that employees are
buying for personal use anyway.
• Borrow with honor. It is important for
CIOs to be partially outward-facing
and engage with customers: your
customers often have good ideas/
practices regarding information and
technology challenges that you also
face, and they can be a source of
solutions that you can “borrow
with honor” and implement in your
own company.
“Look for the one
innovator all the time—
someone, or something,
that gives us a
competitive advantage.
Our CEOs are focused
and listening to us.”
• In this high-touch environment, there
is sharing of information and systems
we never expected to share before.
Identify who are the key sharers and
use them as evangelists, internally
at first but externally as well, to help
keep the momentum of change.
The overall best advice for CIOs who
want to lead the change for our firms
and our industry in this era of connec-
tion was stated by one CIO in the dis-
cussion: “Look for the one innovator all
the time—someone, or something, that
gives us a competitive advantage. Our
CEOs are focused and listening to us.”

Appendix A – CIO Survey results

Autodesk and the Autodesk logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand
names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product and services offerings, and specifications and pricing at any time
without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. © 2015 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
Brought to you by Survey results from CG-LA Infrastructure
2015 CIO survey.

Role of CIOs in the Era of Connection

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