SUMMARY REPORT

19 June 2014 Four Seasons Milan

NEW CIO STRATEGIES FOR THE DIGITAL AGEDRIVING CHANGE ACROSS THE BUSINESS

AgendANEW CIO STRATEGIESFOR THE DIGITAL AGE

19.00 Guest arrival and welcome drinks

19.15 Welcome remarks

Jane Cooper, Technology and Transaction Banking Editor, The Banker

19.20 Guest introductions and first course served

19.30 Discussion begins: New CIO Strategies for the Digital Age

Themes to be addressed:

• Which developments have had the biggest impact on your organisation over the last year?• Technology dictates the ways in which customers can interact with the business,

but does your IT department engage with customers?• As customers become increasingly tech-savvy and demanding, are you delivering

a consistent service across all channels? What challenges do you face when dealing with unstructured data?

• Faced with the rising number of employees using their own devices and greater use of cloud services for applications and data storage, which security risks concern you the most, and how can they be managed?

• What strategies do you have in place to drive innovation and support business growth? And do you have sufficient budget to achieve this?

• To what extent does the IT department collaborate with other parts of the company in order to achieve strategic objectives?

• Looking ahead, what key challenges do you foresee in the future?

20.50 Concluding remarks

Jane Cooper, Technology and Transaction Banking Editor, The Banker

21.00 Dinner concludes

SummAry report

By Jane Cooper When senior Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are gathered for a roundtable discussion, you would expect technology to be the first thing on their minds. For the CIOs of some of Italy’s largest companies, however, it was business first, technology second.

“We need to make money,” said one participant. It seems a simple principle, but CIOs need to put forward a strong business case for any IT project because the companies in which they are working are struggling. The CIOs came from a number of industries, representing large companies that operate in a number of markets. What they had in common, however, is that business right now is tough. Declining revenues, squeezed margins, price wars, decreased consumption, and a generally poor economic environment are making life difficult for the companies. The cost burden of regulation and compliance – particularly for financial services – and maintenance of existing systems leaves little time for CIOs to think outside the box and deliver truly disruptive or transformative technologies in their organisations.

Aside from the challenging environment, the CIOs talked of creating business efficiencies and improving the quality of service. When using technology to reduce costs or improve efficiencies, things need to be made simple and easy, said one participant. Complexity needs to be removed from the front end – where the customer or the distribution interacts with the company – even if the systems are complex at the back end.

Making money was still on their minds, which was the case when the topic of big data came up. The issue, explained one participant, is not finding a solution that will capture more data on customers but rather “what to do with all this data”. A challenge was made: “Give me one idea where a customer will be willing to pay €1 a month to make use of this data”. The uses of big data that were proposed were related to fraud detection and prevention, using data to price products or to offer loyalty rewards, or tracking the movement of goods. These were all related to making savings, or preventing losses, and not actually making money from the use of the data itself. With the car industry, improvements to the latest models could be based on immediate sentiment analysis of social media, rather than waiting for months for cars to be returned to their dealers with faults.

NEW CIO STRATEGIESFOR THE DIGITAL AGE

Other ideas were floated. For example, the various industries represented at the table could collaborate and share or sell their data to each other, but such ideas were quickly dismissed because they would not be viable within the confines of data protection laws.

Rules and regulations have hindered some industries’ ability to innovate as there is a significant cost burden associated with compliance. Despite this difficult environment, one participant said that now is the time for IT-led disruption.

This ability to do this, however, differed for the CIOs depending on where they sit in the reporting lines of their companies. For CIOs that don’t report to their company’s CEO, this can hinder their ability to push ahead with innovative projects. Technology has been viewed separately from the rest of the business in some companies. Now, however, there is a move away from “IT and the rest of the business” toward “IT and business”, which is also becoming crucial as it was business first on the minds of the participants of this roundtable in Milan.

BIogrApHIeS

CHAIR

Jane CooperTechnology and Transaction Banking EditorThe Banker

Jane Cooper is the Technology and Transaction Banking Editor at The Banker a publication produced by Financial Times Group. She previously worked as a freelancer for a number of publications, specialising in retail banking, cards and payments, and also held a part-time position based at the London School of Economics. She has worked for Lafferty Group and also spent a number of years in

South Korea, where she worked for The Korea Herald and Arirang TV. Ms Cooper holds an undergraduate degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MSc from Oxford University.

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NEW CIO STRATEGIESFOR THE DIGITAL AGE

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