Technology and chaos often go hand-in-hand. In the UK, the proliferation of cloud, social and mobile technologies are helping to transform how companies operate and respond to the changing demands of today’s empowered customers.

 

Notably, UK companies that have moved to embrace cloud, social and mobile have realised improved engagement amongst employees, driving enhanced productivity and customer interactions. Employee engagement also spurs innovation and ideas for differentiation that promote competitive advantage. The challenge for the UK CIO is that this creates a degree of chaos, which needs to be harnessed.

 

In the emerging Customer Engagement Economy, a system-oriented, control-and-command focus is a moribund strategy. Instead, CIOs must have the flexibility to embrace the chaos of cross-functional creativity and take responsibility for identifying and prioritising ideas for innovation that drive the most differentiation and value.

 

Similarly, the CIO should be the custodian of translating customer information into innovation. Social channels alone provide a wealth of insights about customers that make it easier to understand them as people, rather than transactions. With almost 90 per cent of CEOs rating customer engagement as their primary priority, the business imperative for turning disparate information sources into actionable insights is clear. Therefore, those CIOs that move quickly to enable their companies to rapidly track and respond to social interactions will become more strategic to their businesses for the long-term.

 

UK companies now clearly understand the potential of cloud, social and mobile technologies to help their businesses become more flexible, scalable and cost-effective. Increasingly, progressive companies are also recognising the capabilities of cloud, social, and mobile to drive increased employee engagement and a culture of cross-functional innovation. The opportunity for today’s CIO is to blend the outputs of this internal chaos with insights from multiple customer information sources to prioritise innovations that optimise competitive advantage and customer engagement.

 

To read real-world examples of leading companies harnessing chaos to drive innovation, download The Essential Guide to Customer Obsession.

 

To learn more about how social technologies are changing the way UK companies are doing business, click here.