CIOs and the Digital Transformation : A New Leadership Role

232 Pages·2016·3.22 MB·English

Giorgio Bongiorno · Daniele Rizzo
Giovanni Vaia Editors
CIOs and
the Digital
Transformation
A New Leadership Role
CIOs and the Digital Transformation
Giorgio Bongiorno • Daniele Rizzo
Giovanni Vaia
Editors
CIOs and the Digital
Transformation
A New Leadership Role
123
Editors
Giorgio Bongiorno Giovanni Vaia
Comexposium Department of Management
Paris Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
France Venice
Italy
Daniele Rizzo
Autogrill S.p.A.
Milan
Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-31025-1 ISBN 978-3-319-31026-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31026-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945711
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Preface
It was 1995 when Nicholas Negroponte, in his book “Being Digital”, reminding the
rapid migration from packaging logistic to the universally accessible transfer of
data, predicted “The change from atoms to bits being irrevocable and unstoppable”.
These were among the first signals from the scientific community anticipating
the dawn of a dramatic, albeit slow-coming, change.
Here we are, around 20 years later, witnessing our businesses and society finally
becoming genuinely and exponentially digital, with an astonishing momentum
similar to the that with which computers moved into our lives towards the end
of the last millennium.
From then on, following Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”, “Inside the
Tornado”, “The Gorilla Game” and “Living on the Fault Line”, the digital trans-
formation became a necessary part of the charter of every company.
Today, this evolutionary process is progressing at a speed that was unthinkable
until very recently. This is a time of aggressive and virulent transformations, which
are affecting not only the Western world, but rather the entire world.
We will therefore briefly describe how this book came into being and how the
goal of understanding the galloping digital transformation was developed.
1
Since 2001, Finaki has organized a series of annual CIO community gatherings
in Italy, with the intention of giving a “voice” and institutional recognition to the
demand side of ICT in Italy.
Topics for each event are reviewed and selected by a Program Committee made
of C-level participants belonging to leading Italian companies across several
industries. Finaki is also the co-founder and platform provider for the European CIO
Association, a not-for-profit international association which, since 2004, has brought
together CIOs of the largest European businesses as well as CIO associations of
Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and
Turkey.
1
Finaki is a French company now owned by the ComeXposium Group, founded in 1989, pioneer
and leader in high level information society focused events and conferences in Europe.
v
vi Preface
The sustaining pillars of the Finaki initiative are vendor independence, seasoned
IT and Telecoms professionals combined with strong event management experi-
ence, and lastly, a limited number of selected participants, which guarantees the
quality of exchanges.
This unique combination is the key to delivering networking opportunities,
cross-feedback and open debates in a lively, informative environment to the senior
IS executives community across Europe.
The topics covered by 2014, 2015 and 2016 events, respectively:
1. The Digital Revolution: a key opportunity to boost the country’s economy
2. CIO: the Digital Prometeus. The Digital Connected Community: how to create
and improve business in a digital integrated society
3. The dawn of the machine planet: how technology advances and ubiquitous
digital transformation are redesigning our society
Through years of working with and analysing different situations and individual
careers, we have identified sufficient professional material—joint reflections, con-
siderations—to provide structured testimonials on how the “demand side” was both
facing and hosting the ongoing digital transformation.
These collected reflections offer an overview of the perceived status of this
change. We expect this contribution will be appreciated not only by the originating
CIO community representatives but also by those of the general public who are
interested in a deeper understanding of the ICT revolution and the related business
transformation facts.
This book summarizes this opportunity, thusly providing a set of pragmatic
approaches to address the controversial aspects of the “digital transformation”.
The following set of testimonials focus particularly on the effects of continuous
technological transformations in a crucial component of the corporate digital
organization: the ever-changing role of the CIO (Chief Information Officer).
Chapters are structured to host 2 major converging viewpoints: the managerial,
represented by CIOs, and the academic, represented by university researchers.
This book starts by addressing the challenges faced by the CIO with a com-
pletely new role and continues with a description of the new digital governance
needed to drive companies to a successful transformation journey.
We hope that these varied reflections will offer the reader a valuable image of
new scenarios as well as some useful insights on the shifts that are currently in
motion, calling for full digital integration.
Working, discussing and interacting with this particular set of people over sixteen
years have raised many questions about how organizations in different sectors handle
discontinuities and react to compelling change and about where to draw inspiration
and insights from this revolutionary unstoppable and overwhelming transformation.
Very often, we found different approaches and unbalanced mixtures of enthusiasm,
successes, failures, disappointment and frustration. Also, we ultimately discovered
that this revolution is not only a matter of technology, and therefore, we determined a
Preface vii
need to reposition the human factors as central to the understanding of new contexts
and correctly positioning their underlined uniqueness, ambiguity and uncertainty.
The set of testimonials found in this book should support the general need for a
strong digital transformation, showing commercial and governmental organizations
how effective a realistic governance effort can be in facilitating successful and
lasting change.
CIOs, among other major top management players, are facing a period of
unprecedented threats, innovation dilemmas and unexpected opportunities.
IT leaders are taking innovation initiatives and revamping or replacing tradi-
tional applications as critical priorities: this attitude appears to be based first on due
respect for legacy, on the unmissable human aspects of this transformation and
subsequently, as vital agents of change, on the willingness to correctly understand
and interpret the unprecedented value and new digital business logic.
Investing in the future today, more than in the past, is of paramount importance
in order to nurture the virtuous success cycle and to exploit the strategic potential of
new emerging digital technologies.
Editors and authors are listed in alphabetical order. This order does not reflect
the level of contribution and effort put in this editorial project.
Milan, Italy Giorgio Bongiorno
Milan, Italy Daniele Rizzo
Venice, Italy Giovanni Vaia
Acknowledgements
We are particularly grateful to the various past Finaki Program Committee
Presidents and Members, to the Vendors Representatives, to the Universities, to the
Finaki Team and to all the colleagues that actively participated in our yearly
meetings and contributed, with their field and corporate experience, a deeper
understanding of one of the biggest, if not the biggest, transformations affecting our
businesses, radically changing the way companies are responding to the market
requirements and greatly influencing the design and the core values of our third
millennium society.
Giorgio Bongiorno
Daniele Rizzo
Giovanni Vaia
ix
Contents
CIOs and the Digital Transformation: A New Leadership Role . . . . . . . 1
Giorgio Bongiorno, Daniele Rizzo and Giovanni Vaia
Human Being in the Digital World: Lessons from the Past for Future
CIOs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Francesco Varanini
The CIO and the Digital Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Daniele Rizzo
Future of the CIO: Towards an Enterpreneurial Role. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè
CIO’s: Drivers or Followers of Digital Transformation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Giancarlo Capitani
CIOs at the Centre of a New Humanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Bruno Demuru and Teodoro Katinis
The New Relations Among Things, Data and People: The Innovation
Imperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Dario Castello, Gloria Gazzano and Giovanni Vaia
Digital Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Daria Arkhipova and Carlo Bozzoli
Designing the New Digital Innovation Environment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Massimo Messina
Conceiving and Implementing the Digital Organization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Mariano Corso, Gianluca Giovannetti, Luciano Guglielmi
and Giovanni Vaia
Digital IT Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
William DeLone, Demetrio Migliorati and Giovanni Vaia
xi
CIOs and the Digital Transformation:
A New Leadership Role
Giorgio Bongiorno, Daniele Rizzo and Giovanni Vaia
Abstract Over the past few years, digital transformation and digital disruption
have been widely addressed in both academic literature and business press. Still,
these contributions notwithstanding, many IT executives are still struggling to find
a go-to reference that would help them to orientate and fully exploit new digital
opportunities through their transformational journey. This is partly due to the still
limited collaboration between the two communities—academics and managers.
Scholars are supposed to be focused on developing abstract models and theoretical
representations of the new digital reality. Conversely, business and IT professionals
seem to be primarily concerned with obtaining workable solutions to a concrete
problem. In this book, we attempt to blend the two perspectives and explore new,
fresh areas that are highly relevant for researchers and practitioners alike. To that
end, each chapter of this book is written by scholars and co-authored with an IT
executive, to bring together the rigorousness of academic research and the richness
of practical experience in a single volume. This book is a collection of stories and
experiences written jointly by academics and CIOs from the IT community, and is
aimed particularly at managers and executives looking for inspiration to advance
their digital journeys. The book opens with this introduction as an interview with
Paolo Cinelli, Digital Business Manager at IKEA and one of the most influential
figures in the international digital community. Paolo Cinelli talks about his expe-
rience with the digital transformation at IKEA, openly discusses the challenges he
had to overcome along the way and shares his thoughts on what makes a CIO
successful in today’s digital world. This original contribution covers a wide range
of experiences interlacing multicultural environments and gives an interesting
G. Bongiorno
Comexposium, Paris, France
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