10 New Make-or-Break Priorities for the CIO
As the move toward digital innovation continues, CIOs are increasingly challenged from all angles and with new responsibilities and new technologies.
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Most CIOs are staking their careers on leading their companies’ digital transformation. In fact, Gartner’s 2017 CIO agenda survey showed that 34 percent of CIO’s are already leading their companies’ innovation efforts. Many excellent examples abound, and we’re seeing more and more CIOs shift into this role today.
But as this role transformation toward digital innovation continues, CIOs are increasingly challenged from all angles and with new responsibilities – from managing the newfound state of SaaS sprawl to seeking and fostering talent in the wake of new technology.
In this slideshow, we explore 10 career-defining priorities that today’s CIOs must tackle in order to move their companies’ digital transformations forward, make an impact on overall business operations, and ultimately succeed in the role today.
Kevin Hansel is CIO of SailPoint.
CIOs are increasingly challenged to drive strategy and alignment into the current environment of “SaaS sprawl.” As the pendulum swung away from the old world of IT-provided applications to the new world of easy-to-consume SaaS, the pace of corporate technology acquisition exploded almost overnight. However, companies are now discovering that the benefits of solving pain points quickly via SaaS are being offset by skyrocketing costs, data, and functionality sprawl, and the absence of a strategy around long-term architecture and integration. CIOs are now being asked to help drive strategy, alignment, security, and governance back into the business while, at the same time, continuing to leverage the speed and agility that SaaS can deliver. Today’s CIOs must help ensure that companies get the best of both worlds.
As software continues to “eat the world,” as Marc Andreessen so famously put it more than five years ago, technology is becoming more and more of a core component of the products and services that companies sell. This puts the CIO in an ideal position to not only drive technical innovation into the solutions that IT delivers, but also into the company’s core products and services. Never before has IT been able to offer such a competitive advantage for a company, and it’s important they step up to the challenge.
Over the past few decades, IT developed a reputation of being expensive and slow to deliver, contrary to the agile business enabler it always intended to be. Business have, in turn, quickly embraced the new cloud era, bypassing and ultimately de-emphasizing IT to acquire the tools and applications they need without slowing the business down. However, many of those companies that moved away from IT to take advantage of SaaS are now finding that they lost much of the strategic business alignment and process discipline that IT provided previously, which can result in an unwieldy technology and security environment that can (ironically) impede the growth of the business. CIOs today must add more value than ever by ensuring technology acquisition and delivery is done in a strategic way that is business-aligned, secure, and has the process discipline necessary for it all to scale.
As IT organizations grow, they are running up against an increasing shortage of IT talent with skills in key new technologies such as software-defined networking, big data, containers, microservices, hyperconvergence, and next-generation security. These skills are extremely difficult to find, because most of these disciplines did not exist 10 or even five years ago. IT workers also need to continually “re-skill” themselves to be attractive to growing companies and not get left behind. CIOs must not only hire talent with the latest skills, but they must also ensure their existing teams are continually refreshing their skillset as well.
Even IT professionals who are in the business of managing technology are having a difficult time keeping up with the pace of change in the industry. Cutting edge technologies of two or three years ago are already old news in many IT arenas, especially in areas such as DevOps, security, and big data. IT gets bombarded with new offerings on a daily basis. Sifting through it all and deploying in a strategic way is very difficult, and, more than ever, companies now rely on their CIOs to lead the way.
While it is difficult for any company to keep up with the current pace of technology advancement, as mentioned above, companies with older legacy systems and processes must digitize themselves immediately to simply remain competitive. CIOs across all industries must drive a digital-first agenda in order to thrive.
Most big data and analytics deployments have been historically driven in support of a company’s product or service. Businesses are discovering that they can shift the focus of those same systems inward to discover new insights about business operations, leading to new efficiencies and opportunities to improve overall business execution. Old school metrics and KPIs are being replaced with analytics and machine learning, and CIOs must play a large role in driving this.
Security will continue to be a top challenge for CIOs this year, with new classes of threat vectors emerging on a continual basis. The sophistication of cyber criminals continues to increase as they take advantage of all the same technology innovations that the rest of the business world uses. They are leveraging technologies like big data, machine learning, IoT, and blockchain to significantly accelerate their ability to commit cybercrimes. CIO’s and CISO’s need to partner to leverage Identity Governance platforms to help protect against user access-level compromises that drive a large majority breaches.
No matter what business you are in, compliance with various industry standards is becoming more and more of a requirement to do business in the tech-driven world. If you accept credit cards (even via an outsourced service), for example, you must be PCI compliant. If you sell a cloud service, SSAE16 has is a core requirement for doing business. HIPPA, ISO27001, GDPR, FedRamp, HITRUST, and other standards are being increasingly required to close deals in various markets.
he Resolution That Will Never Change: Drive Solutions that are Aligned with the Business
Every technology investment a company makes must have a direct path to a business goal. With the proliferation of newer, more nimble technologies along with “everything as a service,” it is easy to veer off course from an architectural roadmap that is fundamentally aligned with business. Solving tactical pain points or implementing technologies for technology’s sake is an easy trap to fall into. CIOs must continually work with the other leaders in the company to ensure comprehensive business alignment remains a key driver for everything they do.
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