The crying need is now for organisations to innovate in order to sustain and grow in this era of unprecedented change and dynamic market churn. While strategic leadership will drive the organisation’s ability to ward off the devils of market uncertainty, there is a school of thought that just cannot have enough about the use of collaborative relationships to drive growth.

Of course, the top echelons of major global conglomerates are well aware that innovation can only be driven by fostering deeper collaboration with their respective worldwide partner ecosystems. And as the network becomes of paramount importance for developing internal and external business dynamics, networked technologies are being developed like never before.

But there is a fly in the ointment. Despite the knowledge that collaboration and innovation go hand-in-hand, companies are simultaneously faced with having to meet stringent regulatory and compliance norms that force them to go into their cocoon of self-preservation. This results in departments—like the legal division—within an entity working at cross-purposes with more customer-facing departments. Ergo, this entropy sounds the death knell for collaboration.

In comes the CIO.

The need of the hour is for these above-mentioned departments or cocoons—if I may call them that—to contribute and lead the organisational change roadmap along with maintaining effective business control. This is where the IT function, as always is the case in such mission-critical decisions—plays a major role.

Organisations can draw that fine line between control and collaboration by embracing those technologies which will guide them through this difficult path. It is here that the CIO assumes a leadership role  by adopting technologies which will help catapult the organisation to a whole new threshold. The burden on the CIO is all the more increased as he has to integrate IT completely into the organisation’s business framework.

And what’s more, a lot of these strategies have to be chalked out without the CIO having the benefit of hindsight. Not only does he have to keep abreast of the latest and the lithest of networked technologies, he also has to keep in mind the often-conflicting interests of various internal departments so that the IT strategy smoothly dovetails into the overall corporate strategy. And since we are talking about fostering collaboration—which does not respect geographical boundaries—the CIO’s vision has to be truly global.

All this means inevitable change in organisations in order to transform decision-making practices and organisational structures—changes for which there have been no precedents.
And the CIO can be at the helm of it all.