UPDATED 21:32 EDT / MAY 12 2017

NEWS

New ‘chief transformation officer’ role brings IT geeks into the C-suite

Some companies are bypassing the touted expansion of the Chief Information Officer role and creating an entirely new post for digital transformers, according to Dan Rogers (pictured), chief marketing officer at ServiceNow Inc.

“IT [information technology] knows the most about business process transformation, it turns out,” Rogers said during ServiceNow Knowledge17 in Orlando, Florida. This applies across departments from service delivery to human resources, he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

ServiceNow held a CIO Decisions event for customers in various roles, including but not limited to CIOs. When Rogers asked a group of four of these individuals to describe their roles, three of them said they were “chief transformation officers.” This was not just a nickname for CIO — two of them actually had the phrase in their official titles, Rogers said. What’s more, they said that the CIOs actually reported to them.

“This is the idea that they had started their lives in IT, but increasingly they were driving these service projects across the organization,” Rogers said.

Digital transformation consuming all departments was the major epiphany for ServiceNow this year, he said. “IT needs to have a different role in that than they’ve had before — no longer just about infrastructure management, but really about that end-to-end business transformation,” he said.

Silos melt into digitized puddle

The guiding light for all is the end-users’ experience. “A lot of work today is trapped inside silos — customers don’t care; they just want a great experience,” Rogers said.

ServiceNow is striving to break silos in its own company, bringing customer feedback ever closer to the makers of its solutions, he said. Team members who interface with customers identified nine key conversations they were having.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we use those nine customer conversations as the rails for all of our marketing?'” Rogers stated. These journeyed through departments to end up as the nine solutions on the company’s website today, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge17(* Disclosure: ServiceNow Inc. sponsored this Knowledge17 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither ServiceNow nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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