As digital transformation continues to disrupt enterprise operations, a parallel shift is happening in the chief information officer role. Today’s rapid evolution of technology services means CIOs too must be agile and react in real-time. As both witness and recipient of  this evolving landscape, the role of the CIO now doubles as evangelist for change.

“[There are] completely different expectations,” Graeme Thompson (pictured), chief information officer of Informatica LLC. “So everyone can see the power of data and the power of having speed and agility in the cloud. But they want it immediately, and they don’t want to do the hard work to get there. So I find that the CIO sometimes has to be the educator or the evangelist for change.”

Thompson spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the challenges of being a CIO in the technological industry and how the cloud and data are continuing to evolve (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Balancing wants and expectations

If companies want data to generate miraculous new outcomes, it doesn’t come overnight, according to Thompson. A company has to focus on the process and then enable that process within an application that’s going to meet its needs both today and tomorrow.

“You have to think end to end, which means you have to integrate applications like Marketo and Salesforce,” Thompson said. “Then you need to find a way to get it all in your data lake. That is … a completely different sport from what we were playing as CIOs five years ago. And it’s definitely the biggest area of change I’ve seen both internally and talking to peers.”

Part of this equation of successful cloud implementation and data management is the ability of a CIO to manage both the IT team and business constituents, according to Thompson. Really good engineers tend to focus on interesting problems — but that isn’t necessarily the right strategy sometimes. Business stakeholders want everything immediately, and it’s a constant battle to balance expectations between the old way and the new way of doing business.

“It’s our job as a CIO to make sure that the most profitable problem is also the most interesting one. Fight number one is getting people working on the right things,” Thompson said. “We had a more than 10-year-old deployment of Salesforce. You’ve got to believe there was a ton of technical debt in there because it was built to perfection for our old business. It wasn’t built for our new business.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2019. Neither Informatica LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE