Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: Managed Services

  • My Takeaways from the AWS re:Invent Conference

    As an Amazon Web Services Partner, we always pay close attention to any new technology the AWS team announces. This makes the recent AWS re:Invent conference feel like Christmas morning—if Christmas lasted multiple days (So it’s more like Hanukkah!) and some of the presents you opened promised to change your entire life and business.

    That might sound like an exaggeration, but last week AWS announced 61 new services and augmentations to existing services. This is impressive as it brings the number of services offered by AWS to 127 total—proving that the industry leader in cloud hosting is not only committed to staying in the lead, but truly dominating its market.

    While we had 3 ABTers on the ground in Las Vegas, the rest of us watched the Keynotes over Amazon’s livestream all gathered in our Level 1 lounge. I personally feel it is important to hear the information from Andy Jassy (CEO AWS) and Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon.com) first hand. I also like seeing the reactions and discussions that erupt from my colleagues when the announcements happen.

    For me, the COO for an AWS Partner like Atlantic BT, all these new services inspire a lot of excitement and speculation about how my team’s work is going to change—and more importantly, how we can leverage AWS for our clients’ digital platforms. In this post, I wanted to go over some of the new services that I’m most excited about.

    AWS Fargate and Aurora Serverless – Reimagining IT Services

    AWS Fargate Presentation

    While we at ABT have only been exploring containers behind the scenes and currently don’t run any production workloads in containers, we’ve paid close attention to this technology. We also have been doing research and development into FaaS and utilize AWS Lambda infrequently. Our developers understand the power of this tech, and we are looking for the right client project. If you have some ideas drop me a line.

    That said, the release of AWS Fargate and Aurora Serverless will be instrumental in both our adoption of containers and “serverless” (I get it…there are still servers). AWS Fargate takes over all of the container resource management and allows us to simply deploy containers into AWS using the control plane of our choice. This hands-off resource management is a tenant of why we rely on AWS and have been a Consulting Partner for 6 years.

    Amazon Aurora Serverless is another exciting new service which creates the first ever serverless fully relational database that you pay for one minute at a time. This addition to the highly scalable AWS Aurora database technology makes Amazon’s database storage and usage more agile and affordable than ever. For our clients with unpredictable database usage, Aurora Serverless will allow us to batch hundreds of database requests and run them all in a minute—driving substantial cost savings.

    Amazon Comprehend and Alexa for Business – Natural Language Processing Takes Over

    Alexa for Business presentation shot

    Amazon announced six new machine-learning services at re:Invent, showing their commitment to leading in the AI and machine learning. Of these, the services that most intrigue me are those related to language comprehension and the applications of it.

    Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that finds value and insights in text. This description might sound modest, but consider the applications: you could use this machine-learning program to read a book or white paper and have the program sum it up for you. AWS Comprehend could also retrieve information from the internet for you, allowing users to give commands like “tell me the maximum building restrictions in the 27612 zip code.”

    With Comprehend, Amazon is essentially giving us a digital researcher who can handle textual analysis from a variety of sources in 100 different languages. In the same vein, Amazon Alexa for Business offers organizations the power of a digital assistant who can respond to questions and commands based on information from different data sources. I could ask Alexa to find a meeting time and place that’s available based on the schedules of multiple colleagues, or compare the prices of different technology vendors.

    My big takeaway from these re:Invent announcements is Amazon wants to make natural language processing the primary way we interact with technology. This might sound like a radical change, but when I consider that we still rely on input devices (mouse and keyboard) that haven’t radically changed since the 1970s, I can see why it’s time to evolve. It will be interesting to see how other tech giants like Google or Apple respond to these changes outside of their flagship phones.

    Amazon GuardDuty Automates AWS Threat Detection

    AWS Guard Duty presentation

    Another important advancement powered by machine-learning, Amazon GuardDuty also stands to simplify threat detection across AWS accounts and workloads. Using normal use patterns from data and application interactions, GuardDuty’s machine-learning technology automatically monitors AWS environments and alerts users to anomalies like repeated failed login attempts or outside traffic coming into your database.

    For a security-minded company like ABT (And hey, we should all be security-minded these days!), this stands to radically speed our ability to recognize potential breaches before they happen. I’m particularly happy to see how easy it is to customize GuardDuty’s monitoring across different AWS environments, which should help us find the right security fit for each of our clients. And as my friend Ulf Mattsson wrote earlier this month, having strong cloud security in place is vital for any organization with a large network of connected devices.

    The AWS Future at re:Invent and ABT

    Because AWS hosting has been a foundational part of our business for the last several years, ABT remains committed to delivering the best possible value for our AWS customers. This makes me excited for what our team can do with all the new services Amazon just announced at re:Invent. To learn more about our ongoing work with AWS, visit our Cloud Services page.

  • ABT Launches Quick Start Program for Cost-Effective Insight

    Data-driven insight. This phrase shows up so often in B2B content marketing that it’s nearly a clichĂŠ. The phrase inspire images of a massive enterprise having an army of analysts dig into huge masses of data and then present 90-slide powerpoint presentations about the state of the market. In short, data-driven insight seems complex, expensive, and time-consuming. 

    ABT aims to change that. Our new Quick Start programs make deep data-driven insight available to organizations of all sizes. From workshops to detailed reports, these 3-week programs give all our clients trustworthy and cost-effective digital insight at the right price for any company.

    “We designed our Quick Start program to adopt our in-depth discovery process—which we’ve used for large clients like NC.gov, Campbell University, and Global Knowledge—into a condensed and quick-to-execute format. It’s exciting to take our love of data analysis and make it more time- and cost-effective for all our clients.”
    –    Eileen Allen, ABT Chief Marketing Officer

    Here are previews of our first four Quick Start programs. Click each link for more information about how to begin.

    The First Four ABT Quick Start Programs

    Lean Website Discovery – Rapid insight to kickstart any digital project

    Our Lean Discovery program delivers data-driven answers to strategic technology questions questions. Our experts will deliver quick, cohesive analysis and documentation of the challenges and possibilities you face with any new website project. This helps prevent costly mistakes in implementation and sets up your site to be more successful and reliable over the long term.

    Application Portfolio Diagnostic – Deep report into your utilization of key business apps

    Our Application Portfolio Diagnostic helps you assess the health of your organization’s application portfolio. Using this structured, objective mechanism for collecting user feedback about your application suite, we analyze the effectiveness, criticality, and utilization of each application in your business.

    Digital Marketing Audit – Fast-action plan to analyze, execute, and evaluate digital campaigns

    Our Digital Marketing Audit reveals ways to improve your tactics, reduce waste, and increase your return on investment for customer outreach. Our proprietary, multidisciplinary approach examines your marketing program from the ground up—providing a 180-day action plan to improve your bottom line.

    eCommerce Launch on Shopify – Start your online store on an easy-to-manage platform

    Our eCommerce Launch on Shopify is a streamlined process that gets online stores set up and ready to sell on an easy-to-manage platform. In addition to launching your online store, this program offers a long-term analytics and marketing plan to maximize conversions over time.

    To keep in touch with our ongoing updates to the Quick Start program and other news from ABT, follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter.

  • How to Protect Yourself from Ransomware like WannaCry

    The WannaCry Ransom Attack

    Earlier this month, hackers exploited a vulnerability in older Microsoft Windows servers to execute a global cyberattack using ransomware — a malicious software that holds your computer’s files hostage for ransom—as well as EternalBlue, a hacking tool stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). EternalBlue is a network tool that can automatically spread itself across the Internet, scanning for vulnerable systems as it goes. The attackers used this tool to primarily target older Windows systems (including XP, Win 8, Win Server 2003) which were no longer being supported with security patches, but many new Windows machines were also affected.

    This massive attack known as WannaCry completely locked victims out of their PCs. Victims then received ransom messages from the attackers that promised to restore each owner’s access if the owner paid $300 in the digital currency Bitcoin. If an owner refused to pay, the attackers threatened to destroy that owner’s files. The attack was reported to have infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries, including 40 National Health Service trusts in the UK. While the initial attack has been contained, experts worry that the next wave of ransomware attacks could be even worse. Is your organization ready?

    In this post, I will lay out common sense steps that organizations should take to protect themselves, as well as strategic security principles to guide you going forward.

    What You Need to Do Right Now about WannaCry

    If the worst has happened, and you had your data stolen by WannaCry attackers, there are now free tools available to help you decrypt your locked data (such as the EaseUs tool found here). If you have not already taken action to secure your systems from the existing WannaCry cryptoworm, here are the specific steps you should take:

    1. Apply the Microsoft patch for the MS17-010 SMB vulnerability.
    2. Perform a detailed vulnerability scan of all systems on your network and apply missing patches immediately.
    3. Limit traffic from/to ports 139 and 445 to internal network only. Monitor traffic to these ports for unusual behavior.
    4. Enable strong spam filters to prevent phishing e-mails from reaching end users, and authenticate in-bound e-mail using technologies like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to prevent email spoofing.
    5. Scan all incoming and outgoing e-mails to detect threats and filter executable files from reaching your end users.
    6. Ensure anti-virus and anti-malware solutions are set to automatically conduct regular scans. I recommend Norton and Sophos.
    7. Manage the use of privileged accounts. Implement the principle of least privilege—no users should be assigned administrative access unless absolutely needed, and those with a need for administrator accounts should only use them when necessary. Configure access controls (including file, directory, and network share permissions) with the principle of least privilege in mind. If a user only needs to read specific files, they should not have write access to those files, directories, or shares.
    8. Disable macro scripts from Microsoft Office files transmitted via e-mail. Consider using Office Viewer software to open Microsoft Office files transmitted via e-mail instead of full Office suite applications.

    The Long-Term Implications of WannaCry and Ransomware

    While the aforementioned steps will help protect your systems from ransomware and other malware attacks, we do not know what the next major attack will look like. Even the latest patches and security products will only block old and known variants of malware like Wanna—and new variants appear all the time. Making matters worse, some variants of ransomware can enter your systems via your RAM or firmware in order to avoid antivirus detection. This in mind, here are strategic best practices to keep your organization safe.

    Back Up Your Data

    Having reliable backups is essential for business continuity, especially if you work with PHI or other sensitive healthcare data. In some ransomware attacks, criminals will delete your files even if you pay their ransom. Reliable backups will also protect you from nonsecurity disruptions like unexpected damage to a data center.  

    As you back up your data, be sure to create frequent backups to several disconnected servers; this will protect you from malware that spreads across networks. It is also important to regularly test the integrity of your backup data to ensure it will meet your needs after you restore it. Finally, I recommend you set up an enterprise endpoint backup tool to protect individual user data on their laptops and workstations.

    Identify Sensitive Systems and Potential Vulnerabilities

    You might not be able to predict the next major attack, but you can prepare your systems by finding and protecting potential weak spots. For example, identify any of your users’ storage locations that are inherently vulnerable, such as file shares. It is also important to monitor the integrity of your module, as this has become a popular attack surface for cyber criminals.

    As you examine how data flows throughout your network, be sure to evaluate the potential business impact of that data being stolen or encrypted by a cyberattack. If certain data or systems are especially critical to your business, adjust your recovery point objectives to back up these systems more frequently.

    Have a Dedicated Security Team

    As your organization grows, the stakes of your information security will continue to elevate. The best way to stay ahead of cyberattacks is to create a dedicated security team ready to manage any crisis you face. Ideally, this team would include an applications expert, a network security engineer, and an analyst who can keep up with the latest data security trends.

    Once you have this team in place, it is also smart to align this information security team with your IT disaster recovery team and network team in order to develop a cross-department plan to respond to security incidents like the WannaCry attack. This cross-department plan should focus on making you resilient to attacks, not just preventing them altogether.

    Get Smart on Ransomware with the Latest Security Information

    Now that Verizon has released their yearly Data Breach Investigations Report, we have a host of new information about security breaches that could lead to your data being compromised. However, this lengthy report is only one part of the information security puzzle. In my upcoming webinar on July 12, I will discuss the long term implications of the WannaCry attack as well as best practices to help your organization protect itself from ransomware and other cyberattacks.

    Learning from WannaCry – The Long-Term Implications

    • Presenter : Ulf Mattsson, CTO Atlantic BT Security
    • Duration : 60 min
    • Date & Time : July 12 2017 12:00 pm EST

    UPDATE: Watch my other recorded webinar on Learning from Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report

    Get Help From The Experts – Have Your Cybersecurity Evaluated Today

  • Brewing Up a Website: How Making Beer is Like Designing a Website

    You’re thinking one of two things: “How on Earth can you compare brewing beer to building a website?” Or, “oh no, not another analogy!” Either way, stay with me here. Comparing brewing beer to making a website may not be as far-fetched as one might assume.

    It’s no secret, I love beer. When I’m not talking about web design, I’m talking about beer and my homebrewing hobby. So naturally, this is where my “water cooler discussions” usually end up. What I’ve found from these conversations is that I have a lot of co-workers that love beer too. If you weren’t aware, we have 3 homebrewers, 1 ex-commercial-brewer, and about 25 or more avid beer fans in our office.

    Fanboys aside, designing a beer and the process of brewing is similar to the planning and developing of a website. Both industries have a handful of key ingredients and important factors:

    1. The concept or idea
    2. The purpose and end-goals
    3. The foundation
    4. The experience
    5. The consumers and keeping them coming back

    When these factors come together in harmony, we’re left with a product that makes both the brewer (or web designer and client) and the consumer equally happy. And, on the other end, if these factors don’t jive, we’re left with a sad product that doesn’t sell.

    Photo by e_walk on Flickr

    The Concept or Idea

    In order to craft a great beer, you first need a solid idea. What kind of beer are people drinking? How saturated is the market? What kind of beer do I want to make? These are just some of the questions any product design phase. They’re necessary because they help you focus on your concept. Going too broad too soon could result in failure. So, we focus on what will work for now. Once we build up a following, then we can begin to introduce all those other ideas or recipes floating around in our head.

    So, I’ve done my research and I’ve found that most people in Raleigh seem to like pale ales. There’s already a few local breweries that make this style. But, there’s room for competition since the demand is so high. Now that we have a style chosen for our flagship, it’s time to plan and test the recipe. We find some friends, invite them over, and have them taste our latest batch of beer. We might even submit our idea to a panel of experts looking for feedback. In the homebrew world, this panel of experts are judges at a local competition. Regardless, every person along the way helps us formalize our concept–making it stronger.

    Then, we need a catchy name. The name needs to say it all. And, most of the time, it needs to not have been used before. We’ll call our pale ale “Crabtree Pale Ale.” This name not only suggests the hoppy and dry finish we’re going for, but it means something to my local market too. I can already picture the label.

    The Planning and End-Goals

    Fully understanding the purpose of your concept can help you derive your end-goals. And, properly planning this execution is vital to success. This would be like understanding and formulating your recipe to suit a particular beer category. What flavor, aroma, and texture components are necessary to the style? What ingredients are used to achieve this complexity? And, most importantly, what can we do to keep this product on or under budget without sacrificing quality?

    We’re making a pale ale, so we need a final beer that is relatively clean, moderately hoppy or bitter, and maybe a touch citrusy. The final product should also be pale and clear. There’s a few malts that we can choose from to create the flavors we want, as well as, a whole-host of American hops that will fit the profile.

    It’s no coincidence that planning and end-goals are so closely related to the concept. What you’ll find is that there’s a lot of reliance on, or blending of, each of these steps. This is necessary to achieve the best product possible. This is also why it’s important to have all the moving parts under one roof.

    The Foundation

    Arguably, the most important ingredient in beer is water. In fact, beer is comprised mostly of water. Therefore, water quality naturally plays the biggest part. Many brewers treat their water to achieve the profile appropriate for the beer style. Whether we want hard or soft water, it is much like choosing the right code base, e.g., .Net or PHP. Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. Water can accentuate hop flavor or malt flavors. It can affect the efficiency of our mash (similar to making tea with grain). And, if you’re like me, this complicated chemistry gives you a headache, much like the programming languages and networking/hosting required for making a website.

    The quality and balance of your code and HTML is much like water in brewing. Bad code can really ruin a website, and chlorine can ruin a beer. Gross.

    The Experience

    The overall experience, or taste of the beer, is crafted in part by the water quality, as well as, the ingredients and techniques used during the brewing process. In web design, this crafting is done by our User Experience (UX) Designers. They’re major players throughout the entire life-cycle of the project. Everything that is done passes through their UX filter. Their chief concern is always how the end-user will experience and use the website. For beer, if a flavor component is off, the consumer will reject it because it doesn’t taste right or it is too hard to drink.

    This “experience layer” in brewing has many moving parts. There’s the malt, the hops, the pH balance of the water, and the temperature control (at each step). And, if the style requests, a spice or adjunct may be in the mix.

    Malt brings sweetness and potential alcohol. Hops brings bitterness or balance (it also preserves the beer). Chemicals in the water accentuate each of these flavors as well as improve the efficiency of the process. But, temperature control can easily become the biggest player in the result of the final product. I can add the right amount of hops, but if I mash too cool, then I won’t have enough residual sweetness to balance the beer. I’ll be left with a harsh, thin, liquid. Been there before.

    This is much like adding lots of eye-candy, frills, and information to your site, only to find that you didn’t pay attention to what the users (not you) are looking for from your website. If the frills don’t help the experience, then don’t add them. And, like-wise, if all the moving parts parts (designers, developers, marketing, and UX) don’t come together in perfect harmony, something might break.

    The experience is a double-edged sword. It’s all about balancing the frills and ingredients to achieve the perfect experience.

    The Consumer and Keeping Them Coming Back

    You may have noticed that I left one key ingredient out of my beer analogy so far. That is yeast. Yeast is our consumer. And, so is the actual consumer. But, to be fair, yeast is the first organism consuming our beer.

    During the entire process, you’re attempting to make a sugary water extract, called wort, that will be like a Candy Land for these tiny single-celled creatures. Unfortunately, though, it’s not as simple as that. If you mash the malt too high, you’ll be left with an un-fermentable extract. Essentially, you’ve made a beer with too much sweetness. Or, a website with too many frills and not enough digestible substance. This could be too much content or, conversely, too much JavaScript fanciness hiding the lack of precision. We want those yeast cells to consume and multiply. We want them to have families that consume the beer too.

    Another potential problem is not adding the right amount of yeast. This would be comparable to hitting the market without proper marketing. What happens? The fermentation happens too slow resulting in off-flavors. And, possibly, you end up with a stuck fermentation. In the product world, this is slow growing and painful return on investment. Or worse, no growth at all.

    There’s lots of ways to keep the fermentation going, or entice the consumer. We could control the temperature, making sure it’s appropriate for growth. We could use the appropriate yeast and pitch the perfect amount of it. This is similar to choosing the right target audience and controlling the amount of marketing. During the products life, how much marketing are you investing into your product?

    Or, if the style allows, stick the beer in the corner and allow it to open ferment at what ever temperature it gets in the room during the day. This would be like viral marketing–letting the consumer run with it! But, then again, it all comes back to the initial concept: what style or what am I selling? And, how do you market the product appropriately?

    Final Product

    Once the yeast has done it’s thing, you’ve got a tasty beverage waiting for you in the icebox. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the product you’ve created. And, if you venture beyond the hobby, maybe it’ll make you lots of money one day. Cheers!

    By the way, what’s your favorite beer?

  • Don’t Cripple Your Campaign with Bad Hosting

    During one of the most exciting games in the history of the Super Bowl, 84 Lumber presented arguably the most memorable commercial of the evening. Entitled The Journey Begins, this 90-second ad told the dramatic story of a young mother and her daughter making a long trip from Mexico to the United States. As you watch the ad below, imagine all the time, effort, and money it took to write, cast, shoot, and edit this short film—on top of the $15 million the company spent on 90 seconds of ad time.

    How to Let a Good Controversy Go to Waste

    In the hyper-political atmosphere since the 2016 presidential election, this ad was perfectly calibrated to be controversial and attention-grabbing. By depicting the endurance of an (presumably undocumented) immigrant family making the journey to the US while the daughter gradually stitches together an American flag, the ad celebrated the “will to succeed” as a universal American trait—in spite of our new President’s determination to build a wall on the Mexican border and curb how many immigrants enter the US. Knowing the country is divided on the immigration issue, 84 Lumber aired this ad during the television event of the year. The final call to action of the ad invited the viewer to visit the 84 Lumber website to see the conclusion of the “To Be Continued” video.

    The CTA worked brilliantly, drawing millions of people to the company website—which promptly crashed from a sudden spike in visitor traffic. 84 Lumber created the perfect controversy to maximize attention to their brand, only to waste these efforts (and more than $15 million) by failing to prepare the hosting foundation of their website.

    Plan for Success with Elastic Hosting

    It’s not helpful to heap criticism on 84 Lumber for their technical mistake. After all, they quickly resolved the website issue and still made a big splash for their brand. That said, how many chances do you get to make a first impression? If you’re going to spend the time, resources, and money to make a high quality commercial for a major TV event, you can’t be so focused on the creative that you fail to execute on the call to action.

    And in the digital age, your call to action WILL depend on your website being ready for potentially millions of visitors. This requires a web hosting solution that can stretch its capacity to accommodate a sudden spike in traffic. With elastic hosting on a cloud-based platform, you only spend for the resources you need—and if you’re expecting a huge influx of visitors during a period of time (say, for two hours after your ad airs during the Super Bowl), you can expand your capacity in advance. If 84 Lumber had spent another $1000 for extra server resources during the Super Bowl, their $15 million investment wouldn’t have been compromised by a crashed website.

    Amazon Web Services works well for this kind of elastic web hosting. AWS allows you to prepare for higher traffic by upscaling beforehand with a few clicks and then scaling down as soon as you begin to see visitors drop off. Even if your site suddenly faces a rush of traffic you weren’t expecting, AWS can automatically scale up your server capacity to keep your webpages online with minimal disruption (Though it is always safer and less expensive to prepare.).

    For example, this is how a major Baltimore news organization designed its web infrastructure to work. By basing their content-heavy site on an Amazon Web Services foundation, the news organization ensured they would both never run out of capacity for visitors and never overspend for hosting resources they didn’t need. Their site also scaled up to handle massive spikes in user traffic during the protests that rocked Baltimore after the Ferguson, MO court decision in 2014. The result? Baltimore citizens could access timely news during a city-wide crisis on a fault-tolerant website.

    Is Your Site Ready for Massive Success?

    If you’re not sure if your homepage could handle a sudden rush of new visitors, do not wait and find out the hard way. Reach out to your hosting provider and make sure your site has a flexible hosting foundation that will—without interruption—deliver the brilliant content you’ve worked so hard to perfect. And if you aren’t sure how to begin, contact Atlantic BT to design a hosting foundation that will support your future popularity.

  • The CIO Evolution in 2017

    Whether technology is your company’s core business or not, your customers have made tech  front and center. Your customers are empowered with tech and they are taking their expectations from one place to the next. Thanks to innovators like Amazon, we can order detergent at the push of a button and command a pizza delivery from our personal concierge bot. Customers who are accustomed to these conveniences do not have patience for disconnected companies. If you want your company to compete, you need to become technology-centered—and there’s no more important role for this than your CIO.

    Bridging the Tech Gap

    There used to be a separation between the CIO, the business, and the customer. Today, the accessibility of sophisticated research tools coupled with the exponential expansion of data that consumers have access to has bridged that gap. Customers now have enough intel to fill the Library of Congress 100 times over at their fingertips. They are even building their own tech stacks. A tech stack used to only refer to the arsenal of databases, programming languages and frameworks that companies use to build their applications. Nowadays, any organization related to Marketing, Sales, Support Services, or Customer Engagement will have its own specialized tech stack. Extend that even further, to list the myriad of personal productivity, messaging, entertainment, and information sharing technologies that your customers have to choose from, and voila, the consumer tech stack is born.

    As a result, the CIO can no longer operate from the inside out — they must meet and interact with their customers in their world. The CIO is now challenged with moving faster to keep up with the broader business because speed is the deciding factor in the new customer success operating model.

    Moving at Your Customer’s Speed

    Why is speed uniquely important to the CIO? There’s no other role in the organization that has operational engagement across multiple levels. The CIO role used to just focus on IT strategy, an area that touches every organization and department. Meeting the company’s objectives and goals for the CIO meant building and maintaining a robust infrastructure of internal IT systems. But this is no longer enough. The technology that customers use to interact with companies changes regularly, and a company’s internal technology must be able to adapt to those changes if they are to stay in touch with their customers.

    While the demand for progressive pioneers runs throughout the business operational ladder, the customer-focused outlook is new to the CIO, who has traditionally been removed from the outfacing spotlight. For example, millennials now have tremendous buying power and can injure a company’s P&L if organizational leaders don’t prioritize an understanding of their emotions and motivations (which are now far more complex and span multiple touch points). Customer experience and customer engagement are now tied to all areas of the organization from initial contact, to billing, to order fulfillment, to call center support, and shipping.

    Becoming a Chief Digital Officer

    So how does the CIO influence these touchpoints? By taking a strategic look at what their industry is doing and delivering in a way that continuously adds to the customer experience. This lets the CIO guide initiatives that leverage technology to transform their organization into a well-oiled, customer-obsessed machine. These new initiatives can no longer be planned once on an annual basis. They have to be built, experienced, learned, and tested. To lead the charge, the CIO needs to think like a digital disruptor. In a sense, the CIO’s new title is Chief Digital Officer.

    CIOs need to build a new customer-focused vision and evolve their organizations to a more agile and customer-obsessed operating model. The decisions made at the speed of the customer must be linked to outcomes by measuring and analyzing customer data. Customers might have buying and investing cycles that don’t fit into the fiscal calendar box. Refine what the journey towards customer obsession looks like for your organization and make an honest assessment of where you are today. On the practical side, find the internal organizations that you can partner with to gain quick wins, while you’re getting the strategic layers in place. For example, your marketing department may be open to sharing the results of a new data visualization tool with the product management team that is responsible for new releases. Leverage the technology to build stronger customer loyalty systems and you’ll pave the way for a shift that will direct your company’s future towards the downstream current of the new digital movement.

    What are your thoughts on the CIO’s role? Has it been evolving and will the trend continue? Let me know in the comments section below.