Today’s business leaders are embarking on the path to new opportunities and tackling new challenges in the digital economy that has stemmed from systemic shifts brought on by the disruption. From self-service and hybrid work to adjustments in business strategy, the CIO and IT leadership bench have no shortage priorities as well as projects they are constantly juggling. Does that ring a bell?
For companies to become successful and combat the impact of disruption, the adoption of new technologies is the need of the hour. And, in doing so, they need to shift to a digital-first business environment, powered by new technologies. In this blog post, we’ve illustrated the priorities, strategies, and initiatives organizations are adopting or utilizing to thrive in the digital economy.
Three CIO Priorities to Thrive in the Emerging Digital Environment
1. Ensuring a Delightful Hybrid CX
One of the most pertinent aspects of a successful digital strategy is to deliver a delightful digital customer experience. Consequently, CIOs must work cross-functionally to design a delightful hybrid experience to meet the emerging needs as well as requirements of customers and business users everywhere. In order to do that, they must overhaul ageing legacy systems and substitute them with modern data integration solutions that enable collaboration, deliver self-service capabilities to empower bring non-technical business users at the forefront, and adopt a hybrid work and business model to drive connectivity across myriad teams and partner ecosystems.
Related White paper: Self-Service Integration – Empower Business Users and Increase IT Productivity
In addition to making a digitally adept workforce, CIOs must take some other steps like consolidating data management systems, streamlining data integration tools, and adopting a culture of reuse to augment workflows.
2. Restructuring Digital Business Strategy to Reduce IT Delivery Gap
Today’s business world is getting impacted by a plethora of market disruptors. Owing to disruption, IT leaders have to scale their digital initiatives from years and months to days and weeks. As the IT delivery gap has increased, it is expected of CIOs to shift their focus from keeping the lights on to accelerating digital initiatives to remain competitive in the new, digital-first world. So how did they manage to do that?
To facilitate their digital business environment and adapt to the new working model, IT leaders invested in automation and implemented new technological solutions such as cloud, AI, and data lakes to deliver on customers’ needs and requirements.
3. Becoming More Agile and Protecting Data
Data underpins today’s business economy – regardless of the industry or sector, CIOs respect the insight and benefits that data offers. Consequently, for almost all IT leaders, ensuring effective data governance is important, and, in doing so, they need to successfully implement emerging technologies. To enable that, companies need to create a culture of innovation and agility by investing in automation and ML-powered technologies to create and scale hybrid experiences.
The role of CIOs is central and ever-changing. In the past few years, they have taken the role of technologists, strategists, and creators of business innovation. In the volatile as well as the highly complex world, they have been agile leaders, quickly adopting new technology and sub-roles to foster growth that’s long-term and long-lasting.
Stepping into Digital Age
Currently, business ecosystems are heavily dependent on the leadership of CIOs for long-term success and employee engagement. Their pertinent contributions have allowed companies to navigate through uncertainty and kickstart growth. As we continue to maneuver through the challenges and opportunities, we will continue to rely on the wisdom and accurate foresight of IT leaders around the world.