IT Leadership: 10 Ways the CIO Role Changed in 2020
The pandemic presented IT leaders with an incredibly disruptive set of circumstances. But those challenges also brought new opportunities.
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To call 2020 a year of unexpected change is a massive understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns disrupted nearly everything about life as we know it, including the role of the enterprise chief information officer.
For IT leaders, 2020 has been a year of challenge that could lead to great opportunity. Tech teams had to support a dramatic shift from most professionals working primarily in the office to most employees working entirely from home. And for many organizations, that shift happened literally overnight. CIOs had to handle new customer demands, new strains on their network, and a torrent of new cyberattacks. Those who handled those stressors well helped keep their companies in business and earned the respect of top management.
These savvy CIOs are realizing that their responses to 2020's disruptions are opening up new paths for them to achieve their organizational and personal goals. In its 2021 CIO Agenda report, Gartner notes, "During the Covid-19 lockdown, many CIOs helped save their enterprises. They now have the attention of the CEO in a way they hadn’t before."
But in order to capitalize on the opportunities that attention brings, CIOs will need to adapt their strategies and execute in a way that will set them apart from the competition. Writing in their Predictions 2021 report, Forrester analysts caution, "Much of your success will depend on how quickly and how well you harness technology to both enable your workforce in the new normal and build platforms that differentiate your firm."
What exactly does that new normal look like? And what are the conditions under which CIOs will be working in the near future?
The following slides highlight 10 ways the CIO role has changed in 2020, paying special attention to those changes that are likely to remain relevant even after the pandemic has ended.
Last spring, CIOs around the globe quickly discovered whether they had done an adequate job with their business continuity planning. In the past, these types of plans often focused on responding to natural disasters rather than health crises, and the pandemic stretched IT teams, requiring them to modify those business continuity plans on the fly .
Some large enterprises responded by setting up "war rooms" where they could monitor IT infrastructure and respond to changing conditions quickly. IDC believes this change is likely to continue. In its Worldwide CIO Agenda 2021 Predictions, it writes, "By 2023, CIO-led adversity centers will become a permanent fixture in 65% of enterprises, focused on building resilience with digital infrastructure, and flexible funding for diverse scenarios."
However, the firm also warns that not all IT leaders will succeed in their business continuity efforts. It adds, "Unable to find adaptive ways to counter escalating cyberattacks, unrest, trade wars, and sudden collapses, 30% of CIOs will fail in protecting trust -- the foundation of customer confidence -- by 2021."
Forrester has forecasted that 18 million Americans will continue to work from home next year. With so much work happening virtually, technology is playing a bigger role in the overall employee experience. Many CIOs are working more closely with human resources to keep employees happy and reduce turnover.
According to Forrester, one of the ways this is becoming apparent is through greater use of automation, which helps employees avoid less meaningful tasks and focus on more strategic and innovative work. It predicts, "Work-from-home staff will see [employee experience] automation perform tasks that were previously done in the office or that held higher labor costs, such as employee self-service, customer service support, and document extraction."
Changes like these could have a ripple effect throughout the organization. "CIOs focused on employee experience will help their firms attract, develop, and retain talent that can provide competitive advantage in a critical year," the firm says.
For years -- decades even -- analysts have been saying that CIOs need to work closely with other business leaders. In 2020, organizations heeded that advice.
According to Gartner, 66% of CIOs say that they increased the strength of their relationship with the CEO as a result of the pandemic, and 80% say they are now educating the CEO and other senior leaders about the value of IT.
The analysts at IDC note the same trend and predict that it will continue, writing, "By 2023, global crises will make 75% of CIOs integral to business decision making as digital infrastructure becomes the business OS while moving from business continuation to re-conceptualization."
Agility is another constant refrain in articles with advice to CIOs. But in 2020, agility went from being something that was nice to have to being absolutely essential.
Forrester believes agility will set successful CIOs apart from others in the coming months. It says, "Organizations with CIOs who are slow or unable to adapt will have at least two problems on their hands: 1) massive attrition; and 2) getting mired in short-term fixes, like tech modernization, simplification, and consolidation, that achieve only digital sameness through peer-comparison strategies by the end of 2021."
However, as IT teams make rapid changes, CIOs will need to make sure those changes don't result in unwieldy levels of technical debt. IDC warns, "Through 2023, coping with technical debt accumulated during the pandemic will shadow 70% of CIOs, causing financial stress, inertial drag on IT agility, and 'forced march' migrations to the cloud."
2020 also gave CIOs the opportunity to focus on projects that really matter for their companies' success. In the Gartner survey, 70% of CIOs say they are leading high-impact initiatives as a result of the coronavirus.
Those high-impact projects will likely continue throughout the coming year as organizations seek to accelerate out of the economic downturn. Forrester predicts, "In 2021, 30% of firms will continue to accelerate their spend on cloud, security and risk, networks, and mobility -- including struggling firms looking to leapfrog less wily competitors and gain advantage coming out of the pandemic."
With so many people stuck in their homes, everyone has been doing nearly everything -- shopping, socializing, consuming media, and interacting with the outside world -- through their screens. As a result, businesses need to find ways to deliver their products and services digitally.
Gartner researchers write, "69% of boards report accelerating digital business initiatives in response to Covid-19." The firm adds, "76% of CIOs report increased demand for new digital products or services during the pandemic, and 83% expect this demand to increase further in 2021."
Forrester agrees that this trend toward digital transformation will continue, predicting, "2021 will be the year that every company -- not just the 15% of firms that were already digitally savvy -- doubles down on technology-fueled experiences, operations, products, and ecosystems."
Many CIOs are fully aware of the unanticipated benefits the coronavirus has dropped in their laps. According to the Harvey Nash KPMG CIO Survey 2020, "Over six in 10 [CIOs] report feeling more influential as a result of the crisis." One respondent told the researchers, "More innovation happened in the last six months than in the last 10 years."
Most CIOs welcome that opportunity to innovate. But now the pressure is on to maintain the positive changes and look for new ways to impact the bottom line. For better or worse, the CIO role has become a major driver of change in enterprises.
Most enterprises recognized that their IT teams would not be able to successfully adapt to pandemic conditions without additional money, and they responded accordingly. In the Harvey Nash KPMG study, "Global IT leaders reported a median additional spend of 5% of IT budget to deal with the Covid-19 crisis."
You might expect that this budget increase would be temporary, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, IT teams are getting even more money to spend. Gartner reports that more than 60% of CIOs expect to see an additional budget increase in 2021, and on average that increase will be around 2%.
This is a huge reverse in earlier predictions about IT spending shortly after the pandemic hit.
Forrester forecasts that at least 21% of information workers will continue to work primarily from home throughout next year, and as a result, "remote work will rise to 300% of pre-COVID levels".
When everyone works from home, it doesn't really matter where you live. For IT leaders, that means they can hire employees who live almost anywhere on the globe. The combination of remote work and layoffs as a result of the pandemic give CIOs a much larger pool of potential job applicants. In years past, IT teams often struggled to find high-quality candidates, which drove up salaries. That is no longer the case, and CIOs are benefiting from more highly skilled staff and/or lower staff costs.
According to the Harvey Nash KPMG report, 41% of organizations experienced more cybersecurity incidents during the pandemic, primarily spear phishing and malware attacks. It adds that cybersecurity skills are now the most in-demand skillset for CIOs.
The work-from-home model could also drive up the number of cybersecurity incidents perpetrated by employees. According to Forrester, in 2021 "33% of data breaches will be caused by insider incidents, up from 25% today."
A vaccine may be able to prevent coronavirus, but it won't do anything for these cyberattacks. For the foreseeable future, these attacks will present a constant challenge to CIOs.
Check out other InformationWeek slideshows.
According to the Harvey Nash KPMG report, 41% of organizations experienced more cybersecurity incidents during the pandemic, primarily spear phishing and malware attacks. It adds that cybersecurity skills are now the most in-demand skillset for CIOs.
The work-from-home model could also drive up the number of cybersecurity incidents perpetrated by employees. According to Forrester, in 2021 "33% of data breaches will be caused by insider incidents, up from 25% today."
A vaccine may be able to prevent coronavirus, but it won't do anything for these cyberattacks. For the foreseeable future, these attacks will present a constant challenge to CIOs.
Check out other InformationWeek slideshows.
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