Preliminary exploration Sample Clauses

Preliminary exploration. To address the RQs listed above, a set of interviews with CxOs of Italian large enterprises where carried out between November 2015 and January 2016. The results are at the moment under elaboration, but a few insights can be already pointed out. In order to successfully perform a digital transformation, managers are undergoing a peculiar transformation: as stated by the peers interviewed and confirmed by the literature, Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Operation Officers are getting more and more vertical, as technologies and their growing ease of use have empowered their autonomy from the previously mandatory support from the IT department. On the other hand, to not risk the extinction and adapt to the firms’ needs, the previously vertically- shaped figure of the Chief Information Officer, that in the past had frequently to report to other C- level officers, providing technical knowledge and hard skills in the single field of IT, has now undertaken a progressive transformation into the true agent of change. This is affecting, on one hand, the set of competences that are requested to these officers, as they need to become more soft- skills oriented, more capable of influencing people and sharing their vision, developing the so- called IT-Leadership, instead of the previous IT-competence. On the other side it also affects the way companies tend to work on technical issues concerning IT: in fact, more and more frequently, these topics are not even assigned to the IT department and the CIO anymore, as it results to be cheaper and much more effective to use consultancy and external operators. This drastic change of profiles is not commonly accepted by all the firms in the many different industries undergoing this digital transformation, due to several factors: resistance to change by entire established firms and their executive managers, due to a traditional mindset and old procedures, also because the market has not created any urgency; resistance to change by older managers, who are not prone nor capable to shape their set of competences in a different ways, since their work has stayed unchanged for the past tens of years; the difficulty, from younger people, to reach roles of responsibility in firms, due to the long career path to which everyone has to undergo. One more conservative result is the appointment of a Digital Officer, who has only and specifically to deal with human relationship with digital technologies and potential opportunities to exploit....