The CIO as Change Agent: Five Key Steps to Drive Top Flight Innovation

Unlike “chief executive officer” (CEO), a role that’s been around for about 100 years, the “chief information officer” (CIO) arrived much later to the corporate party. It wasn’t until 1981 that William Synnott, vice president of data processing at the Bank of Boston, coined the term “chief information officer.” He argued that IT was strategic, not just a means to reduce costs, and should be examined and deployed from an enterprise perspective.

Despite the relative youth of this executive role, “CIO” still often conjures the image of a harried back-office warrior, navigating networks and server racks in a struggle to keep pace with the new capabilities the business requires.

Innovation Is the New Mandate

First, you have to build an airplane. Being a CIO means you’re the focal point for responsibly enabling tech-driven innovation within the organization. Let’s take AI, for example. Every executive leader on the planet is talking about how AI can change business. But new technology alone won’t drive innovation; many companies have found that unleashing AI and GenAI without guardrails results in chaos––and a lot of pilot projects that seem to be forever stuck in high-tech purgatory.

CIOs are charged with taking enabling technology (like AI and GenAI) and operationalizing it. It’s a quarterback position that works closely with C-suite peers and their organizations. As one of many examples, I’ve collaborated with numerous FICO leaders, including Chief Analytics Officer Scott Zoldi and Bill Waid, Chief Product & Technology Officer, to operationalize Responsible AI in everything we do, from the AI models our data scientists develop to the GenAI that runs on FICO Platform. You can read more about that journey in my blog “The CIO’s Role in Achieving Responsible AI: Conduit in Chief.”

Flying the Airplane

The external side of delivering innovation, in my case, through FICO’s SaaS and PaaS products, is the fun part! This is where I get to fly the airplane (ensuring that we keep pace with the velocity of the product teams, and that clients can use these innovations with enterprise-class performance and reliability) while simultaneously building it through cloud, data, AI, and platform modernization.

And it really is fun; unlike most CIOs, my role is very customer-facing, requiring constant alignment between product evolution and factors like global scalability, resiliency, high performance, and activating new capabilities. Our products’ fast pace of change often requires me to simultaneously lead enterprise transformation and client innovation enablement.

Five Steps Every CIO Change Agent Must Know

Here's how I lead the charge to deliver high-velocity innovation, in a way that customers trust.

1. Understand the requirements: This sounds incredibly basic, but the complex interdependencies of today’s technology require a CIO to understand fundamental requirements in a sufficient level of detail to decide whether to create a role, buy or build a technology, or develop a process specific to that functional requirement.

For example, as more products have incorporated AI and GenAI capabilities, we’ve been enforcing FICO’s AI governance policies, which include being in control of any large language model (LLM) data that is going through.

As we looked at how to bring GenAI developer assistance tools, FICO worked with a top provider that built a new abstraction layer to fit this governance requirement. With it, the product configuration can meet FICO’s requirements for operations, security, compliance, and data protection, while still giving us full access to the coding tool’s functionality.

2. Push your vendors (and build if you need to): Whether you are choosing vendors or building something in-house, don’t settle for 80% of what you need. If you need it to optimize memory and the desired product default is to optimize, ask the vendor to work with you. Oftentimes, when our technology suppliers say, “Oh, that’s interesting, we’ve never had a customer ask for that,” FICO has catalyzed changes in their products because of the product innovation we’re striving to deliver.

Likewise, if you understand the requirements, you can confidently assess whether it’s better, faster, or cheaper to build necessary functionality with in-house resources.

3. Challenge your people: Unleashing your IT team on a new challenge, or upskilling them to work with a new technology, is one of the best moves you can make. Team members benefit individually, and your organization benefits from their enthusiasm and supercharged brain power.

Sometimes you’ll need to do this out of necessity. If you’re using cutting-edge technology in your IT shop, there may be very few people available to hire to work on it. That’s what we discovered a few years ago, when a LinkedIn search turned up only five experts of a particular technology we wanted to use. After training, our FICO team members became sixth.

4. Embrace policy as code: Endless review cycles kill innovation. When we evolved FICO Platform a few years ago, we saw an opportunity to re-architect our development process. FICO had mature change management processes that did not fit the high-velocity world we wanted to be in. They had to fundamentally change.

As a key component of an DevOps approach to software development, policy as code incorporates automation and continuous integration with organizational policies for security, compliance, and governance. By defining policies in code, teams can automate their enforcement, integrate checks in work pipelines, and improve consistency and auditability across the development lifecycle.

The upshot is that you must be open to change. A lot of IT organizations get stuck in a rut; “But we’ve always done it this way,” becomes a hindrance to innovation. For FICO, a shift to policy code didn’t just fit with the software design approach we took; it aligned with the strategic direction we wanted to take the company.

5. Earn customer trust at every opportunity: “Move fast and break things” doesn’t cut it in highly regulated industries like financial services. For customers to accompany a CIO on a fast-paced innovation journey, trust is paramount. Communicate clearly and frequently, demonstrate progress, and ask for (and carefully consider) feedback. For me, this is the biggest part of my job; in any given month I spend about 85% of my time meeting with FICO customers.

It’s abundantly clear that technical innovations––everything from AI, cloud, and data platforms to APIs and security frameworks—ignite new ways of doing business. CIOs are the bridge between technology and business strategy. I am honored to being in a place where I can help FICO and our clients propel business forward by showing how new technologies unlock fresh revenue streams, drive innovative efficiencies, and earn customer trust and loyalty.