8July-August 2017Evolving role of the CIO - Enabling Business Execution through Great Architecture and Application of TechnologyBy Greg Tacchetti, CIO, State Auto InsuranceAn organization's technology leader in 2017 faces a dizzying array of rapidly evolving technologies, which are creating interesting opportunities, and of course, amounts of data beyond all prior imagination. For most of our careers, technology has always helped enable better business outcomes. The velocity of technology change today seems to increase every month. For those who have the right vision and follow the right path, there is a distinct opportunity to create significant rewards for your organizations.The interesting challenge most of us face today is in fully understanding these rapidly evolving technologies while thinking through business implications. At the same time, creating a thoughtful modernization strategy for your legacy assets needs to balance investments in new technologies and capabilities with legacy retirement activities.Traditionally, business leaders were able to learn from competitors and make fairly informed technology and/or project requests of their technology counterparts. Today, technologists are struggling to fully understand the implications, benefits and business value of new capabilities that are being introduced, let alone their partners in their business community.So why is this different than any other time in the last 30 years? Historically, the technology leader's role was clear--deliver what the business requested and make sure projects were delivered; albeit usually late and over budget. This was fine when technological advancement was measured in client-side MHz and in-memory RAM improvements and major projects in years. Velocity of change is now being driven by a number of underlying enabling technologies--relatively cheap compute and storage, massive parallel processing, machine learning, smartphones, and connected sensors. The impact of these technologies is exponentially changing our marketplace.For example, smartphones were not a `thing' 10 years ago. Today, 77 percent of Americans own a Smartphone, up from 35 percent in 2011, and over ten percent of American adults use a Smartphone as their only source of connectivity. Six months after a startup, I founded in 2013 launched, 30 percent of our site traffic was on mobile devices. Six months after that, 60 percent was mobile.Similarly, an organization had to manage gigabytes or terabytes of data--and now customers and third party data sources are with machine learning have created an ability to comb through petabytes of data with self-learning algorithms dynamically testing and finding new correlations and even developing inferences.These tools, the relative low cost of entry, billions of dollars in corporate and venture capital investment are yielding new insights and better ways to meet consumers' unmet needs every day. Want to measure where a car is and how it is being operated based on the driver's phone? No problem. Want to evaluate crop moisture levels and optimize irrigation practices? Done. Want to have product line create Greg TacchettiIN MY OPINION
< Page 7 | Page 9 >