Innovative CIOs, Accelerating Business Transformation and Driving Business Strategy

The role of CIOs is vital in the present and future for setting IT trends

With the Covid-19 the role of a Chief Information Officer has become an increasingly vital figure within the modern workplace. CIOs are agents of change, gatekeepers to innovation, and increasingly, one of the most important means of adapting to change in a post-covid world and realizing the future for information technology trends. CIOs are essential leaders in today's tech-driven business world. They handle everything from vendor procurement to software projects, including IT strategy.

CIOs have shouldered a heavy burden in 2020, implementing digital initiatives to keep their organizations afloat. In a volatile environment, fast reflexes and decisive action help businesses survive the chaos and capitalize on new opportunities. As CIOs have helped lead their organizations through the disruption caused by COVID-19, investing in the technologies that enable these capabilities has become a top priority. Connecting different departments with an overarching technology strategy is necessary to coordinate a unified response to market shifts. And focusing on finance is particularly important to CIOs.

End-to-end digital transformation and cloud technologies will likely be the greatest enablers of this shift. On that note, CIOs are rapidly implementing a cloud-based infrastructure to allow employees to work flexibly in 2021 and the coming years switching easily between remote and in-person operations as needed.

For CIOs, the challenge is how to match that boldness so they can not only enable the business's aspirations for growth but also shape them. That challenge is all the more seminal because even a glance under the hood of the top goals of many businesses reveals that their goals are unreachable without technology. Improvements in productivity and efficiency gains through cloud-migration programs can generate significant cost savings, but they essentially represent better ways of doing what IT already does. CIOs have a crucial role in getting the business to focus on the far bigger prize: the new businesses, innovative practices, and new sources of revenue that the cloud either enables or accelerates.

Technology adoption has been accelerating and becoming an inextricable part of every organization and business function. Correspondingly, the technology function has grown dramatically in scope and complexity. The role of technology leaders has expanded not just in breadth, but increasingly in strategic influence.

This prominence brings challenges. Today's technology portfolio is a dynamic mix of centralized, decentralized, and federated services. CIOs at large enterprises now manage hundreds, if not thousands, of applications spanning dozens of functions, often at a global scale. And while CIOs continue to deliver the core IT services that power the day-to-day operations of the business, they are also expected to drive innovation that paves the way to a successful future. Many technology leaders not only embrace this increasingly diverse set of responsibilities, but they also do so under longstanding talent and budget constraints.

The pandemic continues to underscore that the CIO role is more crucial than ever. Whatever the future holds, the ability to adapt to the unknown and transform risks into opportunities will be indispensable.