A recent survey of Fortune 500 companies on behalf of the Wall Street Journal by Korn / Ferry International discovered that the average compensation for CIO’s has gone from 1.9M two years ago to 2.6M. However, the compensation at risk has gone up by 68%.

If you have talked to CIO’s the risk reward strategy makes sense today. In theory they have two forces rip sawing the traditional IT department. While Big Iron has been only in essential areas, the opportunities to migrate systems into cloud and outsourced services has made compensation based on span of control a less accurate strategy.

What is going on now is a drive to digital transformation that involves everything from AI to VR.

Innovation of managing internal and external processes is driving the CIOs to redesign, remodel and rethink.   The who (Gig economy and Third Party Services), what (Analytics. AI, IoT) and where (Cloud and Edge) of services is the core of today’s transformation.

Internally, IoT offers the ability to deliver the data for business processes to analysis production sooner, reduce down time and make the supply chain more efficient.

Externally IoT for most companies offer a migration from selling goods to selling services. Integrating recurring revenue is often at the heart of digital transformation.

What are the risks for the CIO?

Doing nothing is no longer an answer, the old adage no one was ever fired for choosing IBM, has been replaced with a sink or swim expectation.

Part of the expectation is to support rather than design solutions that Operations want to incorporate. The issue the CIO is facing is one of security and privacy.

Many companies back end systems have been successfully attacked through an undiscovered back door from intelligent devices. The integration of cloud services can also be a concern.

However IMHO the most important access is the redesign to the new service models.

Sometimes it’s hard to look at the Internet of Things, and see the service model. Things are by their nature functional and its hard to look past their function and see the opportunity they represent.

At IoT evolution we invite the innovators who are making the transition. If you are a CIO that is seeing all this change, a visit to hear the experience of our speakers and exhibitors as well as the networking opportunities should focus your thoughts on transformation.  If you register with my last name as the discount code you will be pleasantly surprised.