Marina Levinson, Founder and CEO of CIO Advisory Group, has more than 25 years of leadership experience managing all aspects of IT and business process transformation, with 12+ years as a global CIO of fast-growing, high-tech companies.

She agreed to talk to Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante as part of the ServiceNow Knowledge 13 event in Las Vegas this week, discussing new tech, the biggest mega trends in the business, and also offers some of her insight on the matter, free of charge.

After Working for over 25 years in the IT industry, at the end of 2007 Marina decided to start her own company, CIO Advisory Group, with an objective to work with corporate clients, private equity and venture capital, helps clients understand how to properly position their product offerings in the enterprise IT space and how to effectively sell to CIOs.

Just stating the obvious, Marina emphasized that the rate of new technology being delivered to the market is unprecedented. The time for start-ups to enter the market has been reduced by 90 percent.

Therefore, the biggest mega trends that she’s tracking for her clients are:

• – SAS and cloud – which are no longer emerging trends. From the strategy perspective, if certain CIOs are not investing in these new technologies, they are simply falling behind.
• – Mobile, and the consummerization of IT – with everyone carrying their own devices, BYOD is no longer an option for IT to deal with. Mobility is here to stay, and it is becoming huge.

What can CIOs learn from IT giants?

Vellante asked Marina Levinson: what can CIOs learn from the giants of IT? The answer is simple: they can afford investing heavily in engineering. Most businesses won’t have that capability and will decide to work with service providers, but innovation is endless. It is possible to rely on an ecosystem of partners, and ServiceNow is playing that role.

Leveraging the SAS and cloud by third party providers allows IT to focus on business capabilities. They can focus on building relationships with the business partners and on striving to understand what the clients want. This way, the cycle time is dramatically shorter. Back in the day projects should not have taken more than a year, then the time was 6 months and now 3 months seems like a long time.

The best action plan for a start-up is to start small, deliver fast, succeed or fail fast and then move on.

As for the shadow IT, Marina reckons it was borne out of the frustration that the standard IT couldn’t implement what the business wanted. In her expert opinion, CIOs and IT could partner up with shadow IT companies, helping and enabling their services instead of saying “no”. The marketing message of ServiceNow (The end of NO, the beginning of NOW) is a fantastic line in that respect, and can be applied to much more than just ServiceNow.

SAS and cloud enable IT to deliver faster and to say YES to many more things

As for the advice she would give to vendors targeting CIOs, Marina, whose firm also offers coaching to sales organizations, stated that technology vendors should understand the business problems they need to solve. “What is it that you need? What are your problems?” – are really unfortunate questions. Vendors should learn, prepare and make sure their business solution fits the problem the company has.

Be prepared, focus on making the CIO successful. Research is paramount, by all means necessary: Google him, find out his interests and what he is comfortable with. Adapt your pitch to the style of the CIO and forget the PowerPoints.