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By Vincent Capasso
What are the important IT trends in 2012 for organizations and the CIO to consider and how do we measure the overall effectiveness of a CIO's IT roadmap? An examination of several current IT trends sheds some insight into the current roles of a well informed CIO.
Mobility, cloud computing, globalization of businesses reaching into emerging markets, and the expanding role of the CFO in many organizations is requiring the CIO and IT departments to transform from their traditional IT roles to become business leaders in order to drive innovation within an organization.
The IT organization today is more central and the CIO office has grown in importance to organizations seeking continued growth and operating efficiencies. Today’s IT department has a wider array of skills and specialties than ever before. Big data, a mobile workforce armed with consumerized IT smartphones and iPads, evolving end user based business analytics applications, open source frameworks, and a shrinking domestic US specialized workforce coupled with reduced budgets have stressed the CIO and the IT department.
Redefining CIO Success
In the 1990s, success for a CIO was defined by a basic set of criteria and metrics. Email had to function properly, the network had to work 98% or so of the time, and client server or web enabled applications had to function as designed with a reasonable response and availability.
Today, success for a CIO is completely different - as it should be. For example, IT departments have moved required network uptime to 99.999% . The expectation of up-time is directly tied to global availability of applications and nearly real-time reporting systems.
Traditional data warehouses have moved away from simply storing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data with batched based daily or weekly reporting to real-time in-memory databases providing hourly customer measurements in order to drive more timely business decisions.
When we add to the CIO responsibiliy the evolving role of the CISO and the crucial nature of many cloud-based applications as well as the threat of security breaches over the network, the CIO role takes on a whole new set of pressures.
Today, global organizations expect all network services to simply work securely at all times. Redundancy is no longer a luxury.
In the area of applications - especially cloud based apps, the same scenario plays out.
IT departments in the development of global, mobile based, secure apps are expected to provide a whole new set of workflow and efficiency tools to help the organization compete in new industry verticals for the purpose of gaining - not maintaining market share. IT decisions are driven by strategic business decisions that emanate from the CIO's office, not the CEO's or CFO's office. If today's CIO is not doing this, then they are no delivering the goods and will be pushed aside.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the CIO in 2012 originates in the consumerization of IT and the growth of mobility.
According to the Accenture 2012 CIO Mobility Survey, 67% of CIOs and other IT professionals believe mobility will impact their businesses as much as or more than the Internet did in the 1990s. The research also found that 69% of IT professionals surveyed would allocate more than 20 percent of their discretionary budgets that are delivering mobility capability for their business this year -- with a striking contrast between IT leaders in emerging markets 94% and in mature markets 35%.
Similarly, the survey found that 48% of respondents in emerging markets have an extensively developed mobile strategy, while only 12% of respondents in mature markets claimed to have extensively developed strategies.
"A majority of CIOs now recognize mobility's potential to transform their business, and we see that reflected in the increasing share of spend for mobility in their IT budgets," according to Dan Lauderback of Accenture Mobility Services. "But we also see CIOs struggling with a proliferation of employee devices and employee-developed apps and many appear still in the discovery phase regarding the opportunities mobility presents.
Mobility is not simply an extension of today's legacy IT systems, it's a completely new way of doing business. The companies that are focused on employee enablement, customer enablement and finding new avenues for commerce via mobility are in a class by themselves."
How do you measure up as a CIO or senior IT professional?
Published by myITview.com
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