WebProNews

You need to understand this new professional: the Chief Information Officer (CIO). The CIO has to be up on all new technology trends, understanding the credibility of emerging technologies for their Information Tecnology (IT) landscape and directly help the companys CEO to grow the company.

We do know this: CIOs and CFOs who seek collaboration and learn how to practice it will soon see the benefits. Today would be a good day to start.

Recruit good people, it makes an enormous difference. You do not want IT people who only "throw IT over the wall" or are system builders who let the business find the value of IT.

In a major retail bank, IT took the lead in developing and implementing frameworks for business collaboration-financial and operating models and legal frameworks. Operating areas are now more aggressively pursuing joint business opportunities in CRM, integrated product development, transaction processing, and other areas.

Now, agents can look up the status of specific customers online, make payments, change policies, get a quote on a new policy and turn that quote into an application. They can also order supplies and get copies of a variety of documents.

With the CIO and finance working together, we identify the tough questions that have to be answered up front and assemble better business cases to be sure that initiatives being considered will produce returns for the business as a whole.

The "Tech-Head": The CIO is the responsible for ensuring the purchasing, integration and smooth running of all applications, servers, hardware, software and storage within the organisation.

S. Maurer is a 53-year old college graduated IT professional, with 30 years of experience in the computer & technology business. Now is the Correspondence Courses Director of http://mba-open-university.net and http://distance-learning-mba-online-mba-program-executive-jobs.net.