To meet customer and investor demands, and raise enterprise-wide performance, executives require the ability to establish a new performance frontier. This can be achieved by managing enterprise-wide operational performance, including the performance of key suppliers and partners.

The 2007 Gartner EXP CIO Survey captured strong business demand over the next three years for new ways of working. Changes to attract customers, expand the use of information and improve business processes all point to expectations that the way business works in 2007 will have to change by 2010.

Dynamics create the potential for innovating new ways of working. They involve using information in new ways and enhancing the enterprise's change management capability.

Information supports innovation and, hence, new ways of working, by giving teams the data for identifying, testing and evaluating innovative ideas and experiments. But high-quality information requires consistent processes and skills rather than tools for data cleansing and data management.

Enterprises need to change to remain effective and competitive. Change management remains a perennial challenge. Executives need to find the right balance between needed changes and the enterprise's capacity to change. When the two are in balance, the enterprise becomes agile.

Enterprises undermine their capacity to change when they use strategic transformation techniques for non-strategic changes. This situation occurs when executives have only two ways to manage change: strategic transformation and tactical improvement.

Enterprises need to deliver myriad intermediate changes to remain competitive. These changes fall into "no man's land". They are too big to be tactical and therefore become strategic by default, which requires a burning platform. Executives using this approach find themselves regularly setting the enterprise afire, which is not attractive to customers or employees.

Dynamics give executives a way to describe and manage change programs that reach beyond tactics but do not require mobilizing the enterprise for transformation. Dynamics focus only on changing how people work, enabling executives to connect the scope of change with business issues readily recognized by the workforce. Filling this middle ground gives executives a change management approach appropriate to the scope of the change and reserves the burning platform for true strategic transformation.

Enterprise dynamics evolve the role of the CIO and IT. Dynamics provide the executive team with a way to explicitly manage enterprise performance. With this awareness, the executive team needs to make one executive or a team of executives explicitly responsible for enterprise-wide operational performance. CIOs are prime candidates for leading enterprise dynamics, given their knowledge of enterprise operations, experience implementing change and access to the resources needed to monitor and manage operational performance.

Trust and credibility are prerequisites for expanding the responsibilities of an individual on any team. These two qualities are especially important when incumbent CIOs look to reshape their relationships and responsibilities on the executive team.