MarketWorks working for you in your market

Business expects IT to bring down costs, while providing excellent support, while building new business capabilities, in a constantly changing environment.

These requirements contradict each other because there is a inherent tension between delivering service, reducing cost and reducing risk. In order to meet these business expectations the CIO and his or her management team needs to be proficient in skills different from traditional IT expertise. A recent CIO survey indicates that the three key skills required by the CIO were the ability to communicate effectively, strategic thinking and planning, and the ability to lead and motivate staff. These three skills all scored over 50% in the survey, while technical proficiency was ninth on the list of ten key skills at 10%.

MarketWorks Advisory has developed our CIO Advisory programme to accommodate business expectations of the CIO and his or her management team, specifically aimed at allowing the senior IT team to focus on business priorities while not losing sight of IT essentials.

The CIO Advisory programme takes the CIO and the IT management team through a structured journey in acquiring and applying leading practice IT management expertise. The programme is supported by domain expertise and over 300 international Datamonitor, ButlerGroup and Computerwire analysts.

The  CIO Advisory programme is specifically informed by the Datamonitor business and technology research database, the ComputerWire CIO Agenda, the ButlerGroup Review and Information Economics Journal as well as the rest of our extensive research bases to provide relevant insight and timely guidance to CIOs. We conduct ongoing CIO-relevant research and use this in support of the programme. Further, the book “What Business Really Wants from IT”, written by one of our strategic advisors provides a framework for the application of the research in the applicable areas of competence for the CIO role.

Our clients have unique requirements based on their organisational and business priorities and at the outset the programme is customised to address these needs and priorities. Thus the programme takes IT executives through leading practice understanding in a context that is relevant to their organisation.

The programme is designed to provide an intensive knowledge and competency information development programme for one or more executives. This requires a set of business and technology leadership competencies to be identified and conveyed through the delivery of research material, providing appropriate insights and affecting a move to a more business focused IT organisation. Essentially the acquisition of the information and gathering of these insights is a journey. This journey may take anything from 6 months for some executives to 18 months or more for others.