Thriving in a Shifting Technological Landscape with BlackLine CIO Sumit Johar

SAP organizations around the world are faced with a technological landscape that is growing and shifting more rapidly than ever before. CIOs are tasked with understanding the capabilities that AI, automation, cloud computing, digital transformation, and more offer to their organizations.

To help companies maximize their business process transformations, SAPinsider sat down with BlackLine CIO Sumit Johar. He shared insights on how the role of the CIO is changing, and what leading companies can do to ensure that its technology landscape supports its overall business goals.

The Shifting Role of the CIO

Johar said that just ten years ago, CIOs were responsible for building apps and data centers. Yet recently, companies have opted to subscribe to SaaS solutions. While this lessens the time that CIOs have to spend on building and maintenance, it comes with its own set of challenges.

“The challenge CIOs are facing now is the explosive growth in SaaS applications with business teams directly buying technical solutions and CIOs aren’t the only technology buyer anymore. Individual departments don’t always think about how these tools will impact cross functional processes. We CIOs are ultimately finding ourselves spending far more time connecting the dots, fixing the business processes, fixing the data under underneath them, quality of the data, fixing processes that are responsible for creating bad or good data,” said Johar.

He went on to explain that this should change the way that CIOs hire to support their organizations. They are hiring more Business analysts, process engineers, data analysts and automation experts than traditional skills like application developers and system administrators. The business analyst role has become more important, as they are able to understand the business requirements and translate them into business processes and ultimately into technical solutions.

Shifting Focus to Business

CIOs are rightfully lauded as technological experts. While it may be tempting for them to get into the weeds with emerging technologies, they may be better served thinking of themselves in more of a business-oriented role. Johar explained how CIOs can benefit from a shift in mentality.

“If I come across only as a technology leader, then I distance myself from peers who are trying to solve a business problem. I try to speak in the same language as my peers, so they look at me as a business rather than just a technical partner.

Every executive, no matter what you’re, what hat you’re wearing or what role you’re playing, if you don’t understand the business that you’re supporting, they can never do justice to your role,” said Johar.

As long as executives come together to solve common problems like growth and scalability, CIOs, CFOs, and all other executives can pull in the same direction and help their organizations be more successful.

Building a Successful Company Culture

While CIOs tend to focus on technology, most executives would agree that a good organization’s most powerful resource is its people. Yet Johar points out that interpersonal aspects of an organizational structure are often overlooked.

Workers sometimes put themselves in boxes, considering themselves “just a developer.” This can lead to siloes within an organization, not just in terms of thinking, but cutting off communication between different teams within a company.

“IT folks in general are introverts by nature. If you ask them to go connect with the rest of the organization, they’re going to look at you like, ‘why?’

But these are the kind of things you learn over time; connectivity among people helps you understand everybody’s world. The nature of our job is that we are a horizontal. We are expected to support every employee within the organization. And if you don’t connect with them, if you don’t understand their challenges, how are we going to solve them? I try to remind my employees of that,” said Johar.

Johar also highlighted that CIOs must build their teams to solve for these new issues that companies are facing. Finding different and unique talent is a crucial strategy to ensuring that CIOs and their teams can solve different problems throughout the organization.

“At end of the day, if I hire everybody who speaks like me, talks like me, and thinks like me, I don’t have diversity. The more diversity that you have in the team, the more they can connect with other people within the organization, the more there is thought leadership. Everybody thinks differently and brings new, fresh ideas.”

“Those are the things we try to do to connect better with the rest of the organization, but it does not come naturally to IT folks in general, so you have to hire and train and, and remind your team so they will get up out of their seat and go talk to someone or go learn from someone,” said Johar.

Leading from the Front

This holistic merger of humans and technology is a critical underpinning of how BlackLine goes to market. Organizations need to have the right solutions supported by the right people in order to address critical business problems with effective and innovative solutions. This has become especially important as SAP organizations move to SAP S/4HANA.

“Having an opportunity to truly transform requires having the right subject matter expertise dedicated to your business transformation project. Finance and accounting being at the table is critical, because what they struggle with often the most are resources and capacity.

You don’t ever want to just lift and shift when you’re putting in a new ERP. BlackLine is ultimately focused on delivering accuracy, efficiency and intelligence, but accuracy being the important foundation of all of that,” said Molly Boyle, BlackLine’s Head of Global Solutions Marketing.

This combination of people and technology was a major reason why Sumit Johar joined BlackLine in 2024. He said the combination of its reputation within the industry and the people who led the organizations made it an easy decision to join the organization.

“As I started doing research about the company, I learned about Therese, our founder. When you look at a story like that, 25 years ago how many women and entrepreneurs were there at the time running a technology company? I was really impressed and when I actually finally got a chance to meet with her, that closed the deal because I thought ‘I really need to work with her,’” said Johar.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Organize Your Business to Meet the New Market – With SaaS solutions becoming more prevalent, CIOs have less need for developers and more need for business analysts and subject matter experts who can solve end to end process problems, not just technical problems. Companies should start to build their talent pool accordingly.

Technology Problems are Actually Business Problems – While CIOs and their teams often get bogged down focusing on technological issues, they should keep in mind what problems the technology truly needs to solve. Realigning this focus helps CIOs to overcome challenges and help the organization meets its business goals.

Connectivity Isn’t Just a Technology Issue – IT teams are often siloed and introverted, working in isolation. CIOs should ensure that their teams have open lines of communication to all other parts of the organization so that they are aware of any emerging issues and can take proactive measures to keep technology running smoothly.