Paul Bentz, Director of Government and Industry Programs, CISQ

Digital leaders outperform their peers because they can quickly recognize and scale innovation across the business. According to Gartner, high-performing digital businesses lead because of their participation in a digital ecosystem. This means digital leaders will surround themselves with other innovators and they will in turn work together to drive collaborative solutions that drive business forward.

While Digital Transformation may still be a difficult term to define, it presents significant opportunities to the CIO, giving them a platform to drive synergies with business units. This is a game-changing opportunity for CIOs, giving them unprecedented visibility and an ability to affect real, sustained innovation.

This is one of the reasons CISQ is hosting the Software Risk & Innovation Summit this April.

Often times, the difference in a leading digital CIO is their ability to build trust and manage risk while driving innovation. It’s not enough to simply tackle one or two of these…the most successful CIOs achieve a trifecta.

As CXOTalk founder and our event moderator, Michael Krigsman, recently wrote in ZDNet, we see three CIO archetypes:

• Trusted Operators, who focus on efficiency and performance
• Change Instigators, who lead transformation efforts
• Business Co-Creators, who support revenue and growth

As you decipher your leadership style, it’s important to capitalize on your strengths while sharpening your weaknesses. No matter your style, technology must remain at the heart of the Digital Transformation you seek.

Design is more important than ever. Integration is more important than ever. Architecture is more important than ever. The standards CISQ supports are more important than ever in order to drive transformation while improving IT application quality and reducing cost and risk.

Now taking all this and making it easy for the business to consume and agile for IT to deliver? This is where digital leaders are born.

At April’s Software Risk and Innovation Summit, we will be talking about this very thing – how CIOs can maximize their digital knowledge and available tools to drive change through IT all the way to the business. Specifically, we are hosting two panels:

• DevOps and Digital Transformation – how to accelerate DevOps transformation in fast-paced and highly regulated environments
• The Future of Innovation in IT – how trends in technology, business and policy are influencing IT strategy, thinking and skills

The lesson is: don’t delay your growth as a digital leader. With more visibility and opportunity comes more responsibility. Gartner’s 2016 CIO survey showed that IT spending in support of digitalization will increase by 10 percent by 2018 and top performing businesses where digitalization is already “fully baked” into their planning processes and business model will spend 44 percent of their IT budget on digital by 2018.

I hope to see you in April, soaking in our best practices! For more information on the event and to register, check out our event page: www.softwarerisksummit.com/nyc-2017.