Technology changes fast and tech jobs are changing just as rapidly, according to Belinda Finch, CIO at enterprise technology company IFS.
Finch joined IFS late last year from mobile company Three, where she led Three’s digital transformation and helped to drive system developments to support customer experience as CIO. She has also held senior leadership roles at Centrica and Vodafone, as well as at Accenture and KPMG.
As the CIO at IFS, Finch is part of the executive leadership team and is responsible for overseeing IFS’s digital transformation and the adoption of technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) to drive productivity and efficiency.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Finch explains how the role of the IT organisation and the CIO are both evolving rapidy.
“My view now on the CIO is that you can’t be the CIO of the past if you want to enable your business to move forward. Technology is everywhere, it doesn’t matter what business you are in, so the CIO has to sit in the centre of the organisation, not as this supplier back-office function,” she says. “That’s what I got brought in to do at IFS, which is to enable the business with our internal IT to grow and scale.”
That means the time of the more traditional CIO, who is only involved with internal IT delivery, is limited. It is a role that might not even exist a decade from now, Finch admits.
“In 10 years’ time, I don’t think a traditional CIO needs to exist at all, and the CIO [will be] much focused on business strategy and business enablement than it is on your traditional CIO-type activity,” she says.
Back to where it all began
The initial source for Finch’s interest in technology came in the beige form of the BBC model B home computer, put in the corner of the living room by her dad.
While her brothers had little enthusiasm for the new computer apart from playing games, Finch seized the chance to build her own address book and learned to code from the computer magazines of the day.
“I got into being able to create things on a computer – you didn’t have to go out and buy an address book, you could actually build one yourself – and it was really cool because it could play music and have different graphics going up the screen. Very basic looking now, but it was the principle,” she says.
The enthusiasm for tech continued and Finch gained a Masters degree in IT and went to work as a COBOL programmer, which, at that time, largely involved programming – and not asking too many questions about it.
“You had to do what you were told, because as a computer programmer you were told what to programme and you couldn’t ask questi
