How CTOs can help align business goals to profitability

In the current business environment, where technology is shaping all aspects of our lives, businesses have adopted AI, ML, Big Data, Analytics, UI/UX and other modern technology tools and techniques to shape the future of their businesses. Today businesses are built around a customer need, a great leader and team, and a right-fit digital-stack. Businesses looking for exponential growth are relying more and more on technology that the organization can build or acquire. Thus technology has become a key driver of business goals. Transparency, trust, inclusivity, speed and delight are the foundation principles of businesses today. The digital or technology teams are ‘mission-critical’ in most organizations. The CTO shoulders the responsibility of creating a strong correlation between code and revenue. He/she needs to drive home the business-impact of what the technology team delivers, while also evangelizing the role of technology team in the rest of the ecosystem. Mutual respect shall ultimately make for a winning team and thus business!

Here are some goals for CTOs that can facilitate innovation and more inside organizations.

Offering Meaningful Insights and Efficient Processes
A good CTO ought to be capable of implementing and executing systems that provide more meaningful data to the key decision-makers, business teams and customers (eg, real time collection trackers, automated customer reportsetc). They can likewise supplant inefficient processes with automated ones, ironing operations and reducing manual work and therefore unnecessary people costs (think, Zero Ops!). Simplicity is the key!

Drive better Communication
CTOs need to be in the seat during business reviews. Besides, communicating transparently and proactively, exchanging feedback, sharing progress reports, CTOs need to ensure that technology teams understand the ultimate purpose of their work and bear that in mind at all times. CTOs need to ensure communication and workflows are streamlined between departments, keeping the teams in sync.

Offer a Competitive Advantage
Competitive advantage, a sustainable one, is essentially about understanding customer behaviour and eliminating friction while addressing their needs and doing it better or faster or differently than others. This can come about from data about customers, analysed using business intelligence tools, insights identified and translated into new products or variants that fulfil a customer need. This has become the core of every business. This need not be one big, hairy audacious goal, but one-step-at-a-time, journey. The power of one step, one improvement each day!

Identifying ways of innovation and Prevent Disruption
Among other things, CTO oversees how to marry business goals with technology solutions. Ultimately, technology exists to empower the mission of the organization. Every business has the opportunity to innovate, and numerous enterprises are being disrupted by outsiders that are missing the opportunities to use technology to give better customer experience, provide better solutions, and accomplish higher efficiency.

Craft Customer Experiences
The CTO role has evolved to envelop the creation of customized experiences that was the domain of marketing or product development teams once upon a time. When CTOs help make business plans, they need to ensure that customers get tangible worth out of a product or service. CTOs also needs to ensure that for the organization to remain relevant and profitable, customers should be the priority, and it is vital to translate customer voice into valuable experiences.

Parting Words
The business landscape has fundamentally shifted. Success in 2021 and beyond relies heavily on how CTOs harness disruption and bring in meaningful change.

To shape resilient and versatile future workspaces, CTOs are responsible for transforming and differentiating their business and stepping up the bar of technology in extraordinary ways to keep their businesses running in a profitable and sustainable manner.

Authored by Nilesh Sangoi, Chief Digital Officer & Head – Data Analytics, Fincare Small Finance Bank