ETM Intro Series
Based on the Amazon BestsellerThe Next CIO
Today’s CIO faces three very complex challenges:
- How to manage the broad portfolio of enterprise technology required to run the business?
- How to improve the efficiency and security while also lowering the cost of running management processes that operate across enterprise technology silos?
- How to find budget to fund disruptive technology initiatives like digital transformation?
Historically, increased complexity has given rise to new categories of software applications that simplify processes and drive efficiencies, helping the CIO’s peers to be more successful in their respective functions, such as CRM, ERP and HRM.
In The Next CIO, I argue that the next generation CIO needs a similar application to simplify the management of processes that touch the business’ broad enterprise technology portfolio. I call this application ETM for Enterprise Technology Management.
An ETM application would help the CIO and IT better describe, automate and optimize the processes that deliver the experiences and outcomes required by the business to succeed. An ETM application would help to improve process efficiency, enhance security and compliance, and deliver business observability on the journey to empowering autonomous IT.

A Word From The Author
After working thirty-five years in the tech industry, it’s abundantly clear that digital transformation is but one of the latest disruptors broadcasting in every CIO’s mind. As well, expectations are set: To compete successfully, a company’s IT organization needs to deliver outcomes to the business and exceptional experiences to customers and employees, increasingly in a digital format.
But as technology continues to grow in its criticality to the successful delivering of outcomes and experiences, why does the modern CIO have to essentially steer the IT organization – and IT’s value creation to the business that leverages technology – with one hand tied behind the back?
Why aren’t we applying digital transformation to enable the next-gen CIO to steer away from expensive, manual processes that must span multiple technology silos to more efficient processes that are automated and optimized?
For instance, why are we still running 1-to-3 year IT projects to build custom, in-house solutions to automate our common technology-centric processes? Why aren’t smart people delivering to the CIO enterprise applications that automate these common processes for IT?
I believe the industry should. To accomplish this, in The Next CIO, I argue that the industry should create a new application category called Enterprise Technology Management (or ETM for short), which can be described as the Next CIO’s application. One use case would be to deliver common IT processes as pre-packaged applications.
Author, Storyteller, Consultant, Speaker and CEO of Crowdstory.com
Meet your
co-storytellers
The CIO co-storytellers all shared their experiences and insights to significantly shape The Next CIO. In fact, over 20% of The Next CIO is directly quoted from this group of industry leading CIOs.
This group of industry-leading CIOs hail from a wide variety of industries, including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, retail, beauty, beverages, telecommunications and high tech.
Their breath of experiences and forward-looking thinking of what type of application could significantly improve their function helps keep The Next CIO grounded with actionable insights rather than veering off into science fiction land.
