Redefining the role of the tech officer

Opportunities abound for tech leaders to take on roles that turn the often-elusive promises of technology into real value for their enterprises. During a McKinsey Live session, senior partners Aamer Baig and Delphine Nain Zurkiya discussed new research into fundamental changes in the roles of CTOs, CIOs, and other senior tech officers.

To meet the opportunities, tech leaders can shift their roles in one of four directions:

• Builder. By reorienting their function from managing technology to building products, tech officers can turn data and tech capabilities into market-ready products and services. For example, the CTO of an e-commerce company might use AI-generated insights to find new customers and then build out new technology-driven products for those customers. As a product leader, the tech leader becomes accountable for the product’s end-to-end success.
• Orchestrator. Tech officers whose role already encompass full digital and tech leadership are shifting how they operate, to become enterprise orchestrators. Since they manage all their company’s systems and data, they have an end-to-end view of the organization and the opportunities. But capturing the value of those opportunities requires them to work with business and functional leaders to identify, shape and enable them. By seeing the big picture and integrating multiple facets of the organization, a tech leader can help to propel meaningful changes throughout the enterprise.
• Protector. A tech leader can move from protecting technology security to safeguarding company revenue—thus enhancing the resilience of the enterprise. With threats to cybersecurity increasing, tech officers need to shift their focus from security software and regulatory requirements to actively combatting the growing array of risks to business continuity. Reducing downtime risk requires identifying the enterprise’s critical assets and prioritizing their protection. Other requirements include investing in resilient systems and regularly conducting live tests and scenario planning (including for vendors, and those vendors’ vendors).
• Operator. CEOs and boards are increasingly turning to tech executives to focus on business functions. Extending tech officers’ responsibilities into functional roles—in areas such as procurement, customer experience, operations, and even strategy—brings more direct expertise and ownership to tech implementation, minimizes silo issues, and streamlines company investments. For example, one global life sciences company combined its information organization with its strategy organization to codevelop and launch the company’s AI strategy—which resulted in alignment with the enterprise strategy, board and CEO support, and an increase in the business leaders’ accountability.

Q&A from the session

1. How will the tech officer role continue to expand, as technology from cybersecurity to cloud and GenAI, continues to advance? As technology continues to play an increasingly significant role in various areas such as cybersecurity, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, companies will have to incorporate tech officers (ie. CIOs, CTOs, CDAOs, CDOs) in shaping their overall global strategy, beyond just technology-related matters. Tech strategy and product development have become business strategy. The whole organization must keep learning new technologies, and tech experts themselves must continually upskill and adjust to new ideas that can change how they help with results. They'll need to learn to change how products are made, improve code reviews, understand the changing world of large language models, and find new ways to reuse products and code. This will allow for continued investment in the tech officer role and in having them set global strategy.

2. With the importance of technologies growing by the day, are more companies involving tech officers in setting their global strategy (beyond just technology) or even giving them a seat on the board? Many business functions are already harnessing tech to drive the next wave of value. For instance, generative AI could boost productivity in administrative roles by 40%, automation can raise supply chain productivity by 55-60%, and AI/tech can help R&D speed up innovation by 45%.

This is why CEOs and boards are now turning to tech executives to lead other business functions as well. In fact, 23 of the Fortune 100 tech leaders have taken on responsibilities beyond just digital and tech. Recognizing that AI is becoming central to business strategy. A global life sciences company combined its tech and strategy units, allowing the CIO and CSO to co-develop an AI strategy, aligning with enterprise goals and gaining board support.

We’re also seeing technology becoming essential for creating a seamless customer experience. Recognizing this, one bank made the CIO responsible for customer experience as well which has led to a dramatic improvement in both digitization and satisfaction.

Where tech-enabled productivity is important, there are numerous examples where the CIO is having greater influence in operations in financial services companies, or in procurement in other industries.

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For more on this topic, read the McKinsey Quarterly article “A new dawn for the technology officer” as well as the articles In search of cloud value: Can generative AI transform cloud ROI? and McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2024, the surveys “The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI spikes and starts to generate value” and “Why digital trust truly matters.”