Amitabh Mishra, Chief Digital Officer - Vedanta Resources

“The vision and the roadmap are the first pre-requisites to a 2-3 year strategy. The IT and digital strategies have to reflect business priorities. For example, if cutting costs is business priority #1, the technology strategy has to reflect that reality. After the strategy is formulated, it's important to obtain the buy-in of key business stakeholders and identify key initiatives. After that, formulating the action steps to execute those initiatives is not a hard thing to do.

It is important to bring in an outside perspective, for example, from a top 4 consulting company. In addition, a service with an exclusive advisory consultant such as Gartner is also advisable. Based on these outside perspectives, the IT leadership team can formulate a set of critical initiatives that will bring the greatest impact to business. The next step to remember is that IT needs to be assertive and ask business a lot of questions. If business asks for something to be done, IT leaders have to not just execute the ask, but also ask pertinent questions that'll show business what the real issue is. Business likes to be challenged by IT and other supporting services.

Modern CIOs need to develop business expertise, and learn to ask business questions to senior management. If they do that, their opinion would be valued, and they would potentially move to a seat on the board. Second, they need to own the digital space. The digital transformation and execution spaces are rapidly moving into the realm of IT leadership, and it's important that CIOs understand digital technologies very well. Finally, CIOs need to refine their communication and leadership skills. Technology skills will only carry them so far; it's the other skills that'll vault them to higher and more important roles, and enable them to contribute to business success.”