CIO Quotes of the Day - our fifth and latest roundup of the bon mots we hear from leading CIOs.

The Quotable CIO

"As a CIO today, if you have a hard time telling a story, I feel it's a deficit."

 
"If the business doesn’t own their own IT budget, then they always want the moon."


"I didn’t have a first 100 days. When was the last time you had 100 days to do something?"


"Employees that have been with the company 20+ years probably aren’t going to transform anything."  


"Executives who think of IT as free are the least judicious consumers of IT services."  

"For systems that are broken, not flexible enough, rather than invest to fix them, we’re spending that $$ to get something new."


"Digital channels are where people are living their lives. We have to respond. The POV of the consumer has to be our lens."


"If you build more than minimum viable product, you could be adding functionality users don’t need.”

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"Give me 60 seconds with social media and I can tell if a candidate will be a cultural fit for our firm."


"The most important competency for the CIO is Caring - to invest in the lives and success of others."


"Every place I go, leaders are tired of their IT org. It’s a rite of passage."


"Every 5-percent boost in perceived value doubles the cost of an IT project."


"Don't just say that you spend half your time with the business, make sure your calendar reflects that."


"Digital transformation means satisfying customers where they choose to interact with us. It's not B2C, it's C2B."


"It takes two to be transparent. One to show things and another who is willing to look."


"We now conceptualize IT as a portfolio that we invest in."


"Having good relationships is the difference between getting support in front of the board, or hearing crickets."

"Vision should be something you never attain; you are always just driving toward it."


"Our job is to stabilize the ‘run’ side of the business and reinvest those cost savings in innovation.”


"As CIO, part of my job is to fulfill requests, but my real job is to understand the business and come up w/ innovative ideas."


"The more curious an IT leader, the more effective they will be with the business."


"Stop yammering about IT/Business alignment. If you’re in the process is doing it now, you’ve got a real problem.”


"For major IT decisions, I ask myself, 'If I owned this company, what would I do, and what is the absolute best way to do it?"


“Do not expect applause or a raise when you have dismantled the iceberg."

 
"Shaping IT demand is an investment management practice."


"The key is to market IT’s value, not its activity."


"The shift to demand-driven IT will touch the very core of your department’s culture and the way you operate."


“Remember that people support and take positive action to change for their reasons, not yours.”


"Digital transformation is the evolution of the business and IT partnering in a highly engaged online consumer driven society."


"My charter is to BE the business, not separate from it."


"A key aspect of digital transformation is shifting ownership of apps, data, content into the hands of business units."


“Data is the next natural resource.”


"When it comes to self-service, we cannot pass our integration problems on to the customer."

 
"When telling the story of a new investment, CIOs have to remember it’s people first, then process, then technology."


"People prefer the comfortable to the better, and the familiar to the comfortable."


"Project prioritization means nothing if the business can’t demonstrate the benefit after the fact."

 
"Positioning an IT organization to be strategic, and actually being strategic are two different things."


“If the business has not made an attempt to hire one of my Business Relationship Managers, there is something wrong.”


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