New digital technologies are 'a challenge' for CIOs
Cathal Corcoran, CIO of Gatwick Airport, explains how CIOs need to get up to speed with new technologies, and argues that there's no real need for the Chief Digital Officer role
New types of digital technology represent a real challenge for the modern CIO, who needs to quickly get up to speed with the latest innovation and understand the pitfalls.
That's the opinion of Cathal Corcoran, CIO of Gatwick Airport, speaking exclusively to Computing recently.
"The technologies emerging now in the digital space are a challenge for most CIOs," Corcoran began. "Thing like drones, artificial intelligence, machine learning, narrow-band communications and autonomous vehicles - your more traditional CIO will have read about them but won't have real world experience. In an airport environment I've been on a two year learning curve, coming up to speed with all of these technologies, learning where the pitfalls are and applying my experience.
" Drones are great for instance, but they don't fly so well in bad weather and their battery life is limited," he continued. "Fixed-wing drones have benefits, but they can't fly slow enough and stable enough for some of our use cases. Those scars on my back and the lessons have been learned. Lots of CIOs will have to come up to speed with these sorts of things, and they will struggle."
Corcoran also discussed the chief digital officer role, arguing that it should be part of the CIO's remit.
"I don't subscribe to the separation of CDO responsibilities from the CIO role. CIOs need to adapt and become better digital professionals, and to that end CIOs will be asked to become CDOs too. The CTO [Cief Technology Officer] role will however be kept separate especially in engineering-heavy industries. There's clear value in having a CTO that does horizon scanning. But where the CDO role has been split out, I see that merging back over time in many organisations, particularly in small to medium size companies."
In his view traditional CIOs need to adapt to manage digital technologies.
"The CDO role is a coping mechanism for a CIO who has not been able to go after revenue generating opportunities for whatever reason. If you need someone who's an expert in DevOps, that's not necessarily the person doing the heavy lifting on your SAP projects. But that person needs to adapt and learn to do both the more innovative, revenue generating IT and the more traditional IT."