CEO Steve Bandrowczak’s playbook for CIO success today

The longtime CIO, now driving a reinvention of Xerox, emphasizes three critical capabilities CIOs must harness to steer their companies through their own evolutions.

When we think about the many CIOs who have climbed the ladder to other executive leadership roles, Steve Bandrowczak’s path is somewhat unique.

In addition to serving as CIO at Avnet, DHL, Lenovo, Nortel, and HPE, he’s also overseen sales organizations, run business process outsourcing (BPO) businesses, and led global business services. He took on new challenges throughout his career — sometimes taking a step back to gain invaluable hands-on experience in different areas of business — all of which led to him being appointed CEO of Xerox.

Dan Roberts and I chronicled much of it in our book, Confessions of a Successful CIO (Wiley), and recently I had the pleasure to guest host Roberts’ Tech Whisperers podcast, where Steve and I delved deeper into his humble roots, his relentless drive to succeed, his rise to the CEO role, and his perspective on the IT arena today.

We took a few minutes after the podcast to lay out his sage advice for CIOs — forged by his current view from the CEO perch, as well as his own “in the trenches” experience as an IT leader across multiple industries. What follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Watson: What are the biggest challenges CIOs face right now?

Steve Bandrowczak: Whether it’s AI, ChatGPT, RPA, edge computing, you think about all the devices in people’s hands today; orchestrating and setting the vision of that technology landscape to drive the future of their company is a big challenge. We all know that every single industry today — I don’t care what industry it is — is getting completely disrupted by technology. And that’s only going to accelerate.

We talk about AI like it’s this big, mysterious thing. AI has been with us for many years — the difference is, the ship is faster. We can store more data. Algorithms that have been around for a long time, techniques that have been around a long time, we can now process them so much faster — process data so much faster. All this is opening up real use cases. This changes the whole way you can drive new business models.

For CIOs today, how do they become a visionary in this changing landscape of technology — not for the sake of technology, but for the sake of how they can drive and disrupt their own business?

Big challenge there. Because a lot of the time when we talk about disruption, we talk about displacing jobs, displacing roles. We’re talking about doing things that have never been done before.

So, for CIOs, how do you set that vision for their company, and communicate it in a way that’s, one, not scary, and that the business can go drive to that change, and then line up everything underneath to allow you to get there.

How can they best overcome these headwinds?

CIOs need to be visionaries. We talk about enterprise architects from an IT standpoint — they need to be enterprise architects from a business standpoint.

What does that new enterprise architect look like? He or she is changing the way we sell, changing the way we deliver, changing supply chains, changing patient relationships with hospitals and providers.

The CIO needs to be the visionary. The CIO has to be the enterprise architect from a business standpoint. More importantly, Brian, they’ve got to have the skills to drive those changes.

Emotional intelligence, and the ability to understand and drive change is critical — especially in the workforce today. You think about somebody coming out of high school today versus someone who’s going to retire in two years, and all the different demographics in between. You’ve got to be able to communicate to every single level — every single person in that entire population. Everyone has different visions. Talk about communicating with someone who’s going to retire in two years — they’re thinking about picking up a phone. Talk about communicating with someone who’s just come into your business for the first time — they’re thinking LinkedIn, or TikTok, not picking up the phone. Big differences there.

So understanding something so fundamental as: How do you communicate? How do you get your message out?

CIOs have to be those visionaries, but they also have to be great communicators, and have to have incredible emotional intelligence.

For more of Steve Bandrowczak’s views on the CIO role today and in the future, and his blueprint for success, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.