Our Take on the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium 2022 Keynote: Cloud Transformation

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is the agenda-setting event for Global 1000 CIOs who are facing and fixing the strategic and substantive business issues inside their organizations.

Our Actual Team joined hundreds of CIOs who descended upon the MIT campus in Boston for the Symposium’s nineteenth edition.

One of our key takeaways from this year’s event was the keynote by Steve Van Kuiken, senior partner at McKinsey & Company and the global leader of McKinsey Technology, the core technology and IT practice of McKinsey that helps organizations in the private and public sectors undergo major technology-enabled performance transformations. In his session entitled “Why Cloud Moved to the Top of the C-Suite Agenda,” Steve discussed the high stakes of cloud adoption.

McKinsey estimates that cloud transformation represents $1 trillion in new value for businesses, and most of that value will be captured by early adopters. Yet only 15-20% of cloud transformations are on track.

Why? The short answer: the board and CEO are not sufficiently engaged and don’t understand the benefits, risks and tradeoffs of cloud. Many CEOs and board members simply don’t speak the same language as IT leadership.

The key to success? In organizations that are delivering on cloud transformation, the CIO must become the chief storytelling officer by: helping leadership understand cloud’s potential; framing the opportunity in terms the board can understand—revenue, margins, talent acquisition, innovation and market share; and providing context and being transparent about the challenges, failures and tradeoffs builds trust and moves the dialogue from technical to reputation risk.

From panel discussions on topics like digital leadership and collaboration between CIOs, CDOs and CEOs, to keynotes about cybersecurity in an increasingly interconnected and volatile world, the nineteenth edition of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium set the 2022 agenda for CIOs around the globe. Learn more about the Symposium and this year’s speakers by visiting ​​https://mitcio.com/.

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