From the CIO's perspective, this new position can profoundly affect application development processes now that someone is in charge of ensuring your company creates great customer experiences across channels. Insofar as software applications are key touch points (they show up in websites, mobile apps, kiosks, you name it), they become part of the customer experience design challenge.

This is more than simple usability, and it certainly is more than improving your requirements-gathering process.

It's about bringing a design mentality to the digital products and channels you create and support. Design starts with imagining how an application fits into someone's life and makes it better.

It's about first understanding the problems you are trying to solve and then untethering your thought process from "functional requirements" that assume a PC is the primary delivery mechanism.

Design values ease-of-use as much as it values the functionality delivered. (That's a new way of thinking for CIOs.) In fact, a product that solves a meaningful problem well and is easy to use is a better experience than one that has every conceivable bell and whistle but is delivered via the wrong device or presents an uphill battle in learning to use it.