Becoming customer-centric requires building a new set of skills and/or capabilities inside IS. These skills centre on using a fact-based management approach to identify a customer need or opportunity, and rapidly create and implement a high-quality solution — skills often found in management consultancies. To build these skills, CIOs must assess their existing competency models and create development plans to get there. Another, faster, route is to recruit individuals with these skills directly from the marketplace.

Use IT to synchronize the business and the customer. Experience has shown that many customer relationship management implementations fail because they don't clearly connect with customer needs. Before developing any system, get a clear statement of the customer strategy and the particular focus within it. Make sure you can connect each IT strategy element with a defined customer need and can see clearly how this will deliver business benefit.

The customer strategy your enterprise is following will provide a guide. Each of the three customer strategies — product leadership, operational excellence and customer intimacy — has clearly defined IT needs.

However, with the sponsorship of a senior executive, there are four things a CIO can do to sharpen the enterprise's customer focus, whatever the customer strategy:

• Synchronize the enterprise around customers.
• Create a knowledge base to share information across the enterprise.
• Provide customer metrics.
• Present a unified face to the customer.

Customer centricity is increasingly becoming the domain of the CIO. The number of channels is proliferating; almost every customer-facing business process is IT enabled; information is being used to create value-added services for customers; and, increasingly, customers want to be heard and work with the company to co-create value.

This dependence on IT represents an opportunity for CIOs to come out of the back office and become key players in enabling growth and innovation by helping their enterprises connect closely with customers. The challenge for CIOs and their IS organizations is to help their enterprises become truly customer-centric.

Andrew Rowsell-Jones is vice president and research director for Gartner's CIO Executive Programs