Chief information officers need to look beyond controlling costs and engineering processes and consider how their role relates to business objectives such as increasing revenues and the development of talent, a new Gartner Inc. survey has concluded.

Gartner’s 2017 CIO Agenda Survey, released Monday, found that an overwhelming 95 percent of CIOs believe digitalization will lead to changes in the way they do their jobs.

“The CIO’s role must grow and develop as digital business spreads, and disruptive technologies, including intelligent machines and advanced analytics, reach the masses,” Andy Rowsell-Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “While delivery is still a part of the job, much greater emphasis is being placed on attaining a far broader set of business objectives.”

CIOs don’t have much time to wait, either, since this transition is already underway for most of them. Some 84 percent of the 3,160 CIOs Gartner surveyed said they’re already responsible for aspects of their business that fall outside of traditional information technology. As such, their success is increasingly being measured by criteria around business outcomes, including business margins, revenue growth and influencing business strategy.

As far as CIOs’ role in digital transformation is concerned, critical responsibilities will include cybersecurity and the exploration of new technology, the survey found.

At present, most CIOs believe that business intelligence and analytics tools are the most important differentiating technology. Gartner argues that CIOs now have an opportunity to become “more involved” in analytics, which can “connect the CIO and the IT organization with far-flung parts of the organization where they can cultivate new relationships,” Rowsell-Jones said.

However, the way CIOs do their jobs is likely to be significantly transformed by cybersecurity concerns and the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies, Gartner said. Ninety-five percent of CIOs reported that they expect cybersecurity threats to grow. Moreover, a majority of CIOs said that technologies such as AI and the “internet of things” will be the most troublesome to implement, mainly due to a lack of specialized skills.

Still, 79 percent of CIOs said that digital business is helping to prepare their IT organizations for these changes, and that one of the main transformations in their own role will be becoming a “change leader.”

“The effects of digitalization are profound. The impact on the job of CIO and on the IT organization itself should not be underestimated,” Rowsell-Jones said. “In this new world, CIO success is not based on what they build, but the services that they integrate. The IT organization will move from manufacturer to buyer, and the CIO will become an expert orchestrator of services.”

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