Today leading edge companies are grasping the opportunities provided by technologies like the cloud, mobile computing, and Big Data to create innovative change in their organizations, in some cases to the point of completely reinventing their businesses. CEOs are acknowledging that technology is leading business, not simply supporting it. And Chief Information Officers are being retitled as Chief Innovation Officers.

However, writes Wikibon Analyst, Founder and Managing Consultant of The 1610 Group, and former CIO Scott Lowe in his recent Wikibon Alert, “CIOs Must Return Innovation to the Enterprise”, the key to successful innovation is building a corporate culture that embraces rather than fights change. Technology alone won’t do the job.

Part of the problem for many organizations is that since the 2008 Great Recession they have been in total cost control mode, and CIOs have been judged by how well they can control IT costs, which leaves them without the resources to innovate. A CIO who can cut 20% from the IT budget while keeping the lights on has been seen as a hero. But, Lowe argues, if that same CIO could institute technology-based changes that saved 5% of costs or increases productivity by 5% across the entire organization, a very real prospect with cloud and mobile computing, that would have a much greater and longer-lasting impact on the company.

However, just introducing some cloud services and a BYOB mobile policy is not enough to realize the real benefits of those technologies. Technological change must empower organizational change, and that is always threatening to the internal power structure, and particularly middle-management. Changing the CIO’s title, Lowe writes, is the easiest part of the process.

To make that organizational change, the CIO must have full commitment from the CEO, CFO, and other key managers including the heads of the major corporate divisions. And they must sell the vision of transformation as a benefit rather than a threat to the people working for them. That requires a management team with the imagination to see what the company might become and willingness to rethink corporate strategies and to invest now in innovative infrastructure in the expectation of future benefits. The CIO can start this process by educating senior leadership on the possibilities that the huge technological change washing over IT holds, but it is up to those leaders to grasp the ball and run with it.