CIO as a Service

by Rajesh Nair, Philipp Suter und Sebastian Köster 

In recent years so called “as a Service” models evolved fast, mainly in the field of software, platform, and IT infrastructure. The benefits of this service model include:

• Increased Flexibility: The service (e.g. software) is highly scalable and can be used within a short period of time.
• Efficiency Excellence: The service is usually shared between various parties (e.g. software resides in a shared or multitenant environment). Both fixed and variable costs can therefore be significantly reduced compared to traditional models.
• Innovation Power: The service provider ensures that the services are always on the cutting edge of technology through continuous development of features and automatically conducted updates.

Overall, this “as a Service” approach is a service level agreement that helps companies to increase flexibility and efficiency while ensuring to work with the latest technologies. So why not apply this concept to certain roles of the organization such as the CIO?

The CIO always needs to be able to combine the business perspective and needs with the latest technology. Guiding the company through the journey of digitization and the jungle of ever evolving requirements for new solutions and applications requires an organization with the right number of FTEs and skills (e.g. EAM, cyber security, data architecture etc.). The organizational set up therefore has to be flexible enough to cope with the constantly changing requirements of the digital journey. Having flexible access to cutting edge skills consistently becomes a priority and lies at the core of CIOaaS.

This is where digitalization experts such as Detecon come in to play. With our senior experts (many of whom have already held the role of CIO) we fill the digital gap between technology, business, IT and operating models. With our CIOaaS model we are able to support our clients in increasing their flexibility, efficiency excellence and innovation power. This includes not only developing the strategy, roadmap, and benchmarks but also the doing itself.

While some of our customers already transition to full CIOaaS model, we believe that the medium and larger enterprise will transition more and more to a hybrid model over the next 3-5 years.