The Financial Times, in partnership with HP, recently held an event in Milan to discuss new CIO strategies for the digital age. Topics discussed included customer engagement, consistent delivery of service across all channels, strategies for driving innovation and supporting business growth, and security concerns in an era of BYOD and cloud services. This white paper highlight key discussion points from the event.

1. SUMMARY REPORT
19 June 2014
Four Seasons
Milan
NEW CIO STRATEGIES
FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
DRIVING CHANGE
ACROSS THE BUSINESS

2. Agenda
NEW CIO STRATEGIES
FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
19.00 Guest arrival and welcome drinks
19.15 Welcome remarks
Jane Cooper, Technology and Transaction Banking Editor, The Banker
19.20 Guest introductions and first course served
19.30 Discussion begins: New CIO Strategies for the Digital Age
Themes to be addressed:
• Which developments have had the biggest impact on your organisation over the last year?
• Technology dictates the ways in which customers can interact with the business,
but does your IT department engage with customers?
• As customers become increasingly tech-savvy and demanding, are you delivering
a consistent service across all channels? What challenges do you face when
dealing with unstructured data?
• Faced with the rising number of employees using their own devices and greater
use of cloud services for applications and data storage, which security risks
concern you the most, and how can they be managed?
• What strategies do you have in place to drive innovation and support business
growth? And do you have sufficient budget to achieve this?
• To what extent does the IT department collaborate with other parts of the
company in order to achieve strategic objectives?
• Looking ahead, what key challenges do you foresee in the future?
20.50 Concluding remarks
Jane Cooper, Technology and Transaction Banking Editor, The Banker
21.00 Dinner concludes

3. Summary Report
By Jane Cooper
When senior Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are gathered for a roundtable
discussion, you would expect technology to be the first thing on their minds.
For the CIOs of some of Italy’s largest companies, however, it was business first,
technology second.
“We need to make money,” said one participant. It seems a simple principle, but
CIOs need to put forward a strong business case for any IT project because the
companies in which they are working are struggling. The CIOs came from a number
of industries, representing large companies that operate in a number of markets.
What they had in common, however, is that business right now is tough.
Declining revenues, squeezed margins, price wars, decreased consumption, and a
generally poor economic environment are making life difficult for the companies. The
cost burden of regulation and compliance – particularly for financial services – and
maintenance of existing systems leaves little time for CIOs to think outside the box
and deliver truly disruptive or transformative technologies in their organisations.
Aside from the challenging environment, the CIOs talked of creating business
efficiencies and improving the quality of service. When using technology to reduce
costs or improve efficiencies, things need to be made simple and easy, said one
participant. Complexity needs to be removed from the front end – where the
customer or the distribution interacts with the company – even if the systems are
complex at the back end.
Making money was still on their minds, which was the case when the topic of big
data came up. The issue, explained one participant, is not finding a solution that
will capture more data on customers but rather “what to do with all this data”. A
challenge was made: “Give me one idea where a customer will be willing to pay €1
a month to make use of this data”. The uses of big data that were proposed were
related to fraud detection and prevention, using data to price products or to offer
loyalty rewards, or tracking the movement of goods. These were all related to
making savings, or preventing losses, and not actually making money from the use
of the data itself. With the car industry, improvements to the latest models could
be based on immediate sentiment analysis of social media, rather than waiting for
months for cars to be returned to their dealers with faults.

4. NEW CIO STRATEGIES
FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
Other ideas were floated. For example, the various industries represented at the
table could collaborate and share or sell their data to each other, but such ideas
were quickly dismissed because they would not be viable within the confines of
data protection laws.
Rules and regulations have hindered some industries’ ability to innovate as there
is a significant cost burden associated with compliance. Despite this difficult
environment, one participant said that now is the time for IT-led disruption.
This ability to do this, however, differed for the CIOs depending on where they
sit in the reporting lines of their companies. For CIOs that don’t report to their
company’s CEO, this can hinder their ability to push ahead with innovative
projects. Technology has been viewed separately from the rest of the business
in some companies. Now, however, there is a move away from “IT and the rest of
the business” toward “IT and business”, which is also becoming crucial as it was
business first on the minds of the participants of this roundtable in Milan.

5. BIOGRAPHIES
CHAIR
Jane Cooper
Technology and Transaction Banking Editor
The Banker
Jane Cooper is the Technology and Transaction Banking Editor at
The Banker a publication produced by Financial Times Group. She
previously worked as a freelancer for a number of publications,
specialising in retail banking, cards and payments, and also held a
part-time position based at the London School of Economics. She
has worked for Lafferty Group and also spent a number of years in
South Korea, where she worked for The Korea Herald and Arirang TV. Ms Cooper
holds an undergraduate degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS) and an MSc from Oxford University.

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7. NEW CIO STRATEGIES
FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
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