Discussion - The role of the CIO

CATI aims to provide solutions that reduce cost and provide time and material savings for our customers.  Often times, our solutions are pretty easy to justify:  If it takes someone a week to design and document a product using SolidWorks versus 4 weeks in traditional 2D tools...well, it's easy to see how this will pay for itself in time.

One of the more difficult items on which to put a price tag is risk...how does one assess risk?  A customer of ours in St. Louis recently told me this when asked why they planned to implement PDM:  "It's one of these things that just feels like the right thing to do to protect our data."  As hard as it is to come to terms with that statement, it is often true.  Sometimes, it is critical to wrap your arms around your intellectual property before something goes wrong.  Murphy's Law doesn't bat 1.000, but it certainly frequents the All Star Game.

In that spirit, I wanted to share an interesting article regarding the role of the CIO in today's organization.  While I don't agree with every point, it certainly lends some insight as to why CIO's should care about solutions such as Enterprise PDM:

1. Reduce of risk


2. Improve cycle times


3. Reduce Cost

One would be hard pressed to find a VP of Engineering, a key customer of any IT department, that isn't challenged to improve in all 3 of those key areas.  Our solutions are simple to use and to deploy, improve SolidWorks performance (this is an older article, but still relevant today), and certainly automate the process of finding and re-using product development files/data...and by managing the data in a secure vault with configured revision control, we can certainly reduce the risk of manufacturing to the wrong revision or losing one's data.

I am curious to know your impressions of the article:  http://www.zdnet.com/why-cio-success-comes-down-to-just-three-things-7000006850/