CIONET Cookbook : Recipes for Digital Success Hardback

During the past two years organisations have changed dramatically.

This shift has been accelerated by the business response to the pandemic and an associated and long-awaited move to digitization, from home working to online shopping, virtual meetings, streamed entertainment, remote healthcare, online banking and many more activities.

The IT department has been at the epicentre of this dramatic change.

In March 2020, 2.7 billion employees globally relocated from their usual place of work to the home, requiring the establishment of virtual connections and a wide range of collaborative tools.

At the same time, the volume of online enquiries and transactions across all businesses mushroomed in a matter of days, requiring scalable solutions.

Cloud-based platforms, such as Office 365, and video-conferencing systems, such as Zoom and Teams, helped to accommodate distributed working.

However, the rapid rise of external interactions through customer enquiries required businesses to introduce new techniques such as robotic process automation (RPA), remote sensing, increased cybersecurity tools and artificial intelligence (AI). Across all the interviews CIONET conducted in 2020, one aspect stood out above all others: the historic focus on operational excellence and an associated modernisation of the core business had to take second place as organisations scrambled first to engage with and satisfy their end customers.

All subsequent efforts have been directed at enhancing the customer journey, whether this is an external consumer or an internal worker.

Most C-suite executives recognised that their digital leaders had business models, such as customer centricity and hybrid working, that could help their organisations respond to cataclysmic change.

Instead of watching and waiting, incumbents had to embrace digitisation to stay competitive in this new, fast-changing world. This IT Cookbook looks at the impact of this dramatic and prolonged change on business and offers solutions based on the examples of nearly 30 top CIOs.

It uses the analogy of a restaurant to describe how organisations can create and operate a five-star business with all the IT ingredients necessary to support the establishment and the CIO as its Master Chef.

Each chapter contains an overview of a particular business situation plus three recipes for innovation success, each based on an interview with an influential CIO.