Shaping the Future: How IT Leaders are Turning Responsibility into Opportunity

We recently wrote about the expanding role of IT (and why you should take your CIO to lunch!). As organizations in every industry increasingly lean on their IT teams to support critical business services, CIOs are facing bigger responsibilities than ever before. Thanks to the rise of infrastructure and software as a service, CIOs can embrace these new duties as opportunities to shape the future of their organizations. Instead of rebuilding platform layers from scratch, IT teams can now assemble modular services into complete solutions. This frees up time and resources to focus on unique product features, whether that involves making employees more productive, bringing greater value to customers, uncovering new revenue, or all of the above. So how are real-life CIOs transitioning into the role of “chief business enabler”? There’s no better place to look than our customers.

We sat down with IT leaders at FICO, Informatica and Rotary International to tell us how they rely on services like Okta’s in order to spend more time improving user experience and driving revenue. Hear what they have to say in the video below, and in the highlights we put together here:

• Tony McGivern, CIO, FICO: “Okta has freed up resources that allowed us to stop focusing on internal IT and start focusing on the FICO Analytic Cloud and solutions that generate revenue. In this new age, if you’re going to work with cloud based providers, those cloud based providers are going to become part of your business.”
• Lisa Moorhead, Director of IT Applications, Informatica: “One requirement we looked at when embarking on our e-commerce initiative was making it seamless for the end user. It needed to look like Informatica, so we used Okta APIs in order to handle all the user management, registrations and forgotten passwords – all behind the scenes while letting the user still feel like they’re inside the Informatica property.”
• Peter Markos, CIO, Rotary International: “That’s the future for Rotary. We’re crowd-sourcing application functionality. Okta is helping us lower barriers to adoption and making it easy for any Rotarian to say, “I know how to use this functionality!” They use the same ID and password and get right to the good stuff and the value, as opposed to having hurdles to jump through.”

For more on the rising CIO opportunity, visit: www.okta.com/learn/build-digital-business.