The Chief Information Officer or CIO has a really challenging job. In recent times, digitization has changed the business landscape phenomenally. Organizations have been looking at reinventing themselves digitally while promoting security against threats and more. To put it in a nutshell, CIOs are facing challenges that include Cyber security, diversity, keeping things relevant and challenges in effectively managing stakeholders.
The advancement in technology and different business models is the main reason behind the shift in global economic power. It has emphasized CIOs to stay ahead of the existing competitors. Equipped with multiple tools like cloud computing, analytics, various mobile applications, robotics and machine aided learning, the business opportunities have changed so have the costs involved. Significantly precise supply chains; vibrant and reliable personalized products and promotional campaigns which eventually leads to loyal customers are the major strategies that the CIO must pay heed to, in the coming years.
According to research by Forbes, the top 5 challenges that CIOs are going to face in 2017:
- Leading the company`s digital transformation
Gone are the days when the CIOs were focussed on facilitating the company`s digital transformation. The time has come to ensure that CIOs are leading the digital transformation and going all out to bring about significant changes. According to reports by Gartner, almost 40% of respondents to the 2016 CIO Agenda survey are overseeing the digital transformation efforts while 60% of CIOs are still hanging on others coattails. 2017 is going to be a tough year ahead for CIOs who are not prepared to lead such transformational endeavours. - 2017 is going for a more relevant customer experience than customer centricity:
A business achieves maximum success when the top leaders take the initiative to reach their customers and interact with them through various platforms. Business savvy CIOs that take a keen interest in monitoring the sales, marketing and finance along with the operational aspects end up getting more out of their efforts. According to Deloitte’s global CIO survey, 57% of respondents chose “customers” as their top business priority. But only a meagre 45% of CIOs believed that their initiatives have helped augment the customer experience. In order to meet the tough challenges that lay ahead CIOs must commit to spending close to 20% of their time with customers. This will result in heads-up IT leadership. - Make software and data analytics the center of the company:
Time and again we read about the Internet of Things. It refers to the detailed process of collecting data from sensors and then analysing the data to get new insights and better market opportunities. It has been estimated that about a 50 billion things will be connected to the internet by 2020, irrespective of whether the company delivers packages or is a manufacturing hub. The CIO is responsible for putting things together. - Strategize business plans effectively and do things faster:
The speed of the business often determines the success and as digitization takes over there is a need to exploit newer opportunities faster. CIOs must take charge and work on delivering faster and respond to queries on time. Speeding up the business time is one of the most important aspects of ensuring that the business is on fast track growth and excels. With Cloud Computing changing the technological landscape of the business, speed has become integral to business. Companies today must operate at a different speed than they did years ago. - Application development teams must be given the extra nudge for speed and agility:
Digitization offers a set of challenges and as an avid CIO, are you confident that your team is equipped to handle the changes? Is your development team equipped to make changes to the environment quickly when there are change of plans? Most development organizations have cloud based platforms and development tools. The CIOs job is to ascertain that the business is ready to deploy production apps in Cloud.
Modern CIOs that succeed in achieving the above objectives will be able to navigate their businesses along the path of success. They are bound to ring in higher revenue with a customer-focussed and digitally adept future.
Written By Andrea Price
For Dunlopmarketing
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