Hard to believe that it’s November 2016 already, isn’t it? For many organizations, it’s time to start thinking about information technology budgets, and goals for the following fiscal year.
The Digitization Driver
According to the 2017 CIO Agenda Report, one of the biggest forces impacting business today is digitization. With digitization, traditional linear organization flows, which were unidirectional, are being replaced with digital ecosystems that encourage and facilitate sharing of systems and information. These systems provide numerous advantages, including improved customer experience, greater scale, increased redundancy and resilience, and most of all, enhanced access to big data resulting in faster, more accurate decision making through all levels of the enterprise.
Digitization is driving the most successful companies around the world. According to Dave Aron, Vice President at Gartner, “We are now knee-deep in the era of digital business, with many companies reimagining their business and operating models based on digital capabilities.”
How digitization helps the enterprise
Andy Rowsell-Jones, research vice president at Gartner said, “A digital ecosystem amplifies the reach of a company. It not only enables scalable connections between known partners and customers, but also provides a platform for unknown parties to connect with one another.”
To facilitate the digitization drive, “top performers” in the annual Gartner CIO Agenda Report site digital security, business intelligence and analytics, and cloud services as their top 3 line items.
Why these 3
Moreover, there are significant amplifying effects between the big three CIO challenges for 2017. As forces impact one area, they impact and increase demand for the others.
Let’s use cloud computing as a starting point.
Cloud environments provide significant opportunities for infrastructure flexibility, scalability and affordability. With increasing maturity, the cloud is evolving into a logical, more cost effective alternative to purchasing, maintaining, securing and updating a physical technology infrastructure.
What is driving demand for cloud migrations? The other 2 CIO priorities: big data and business intelligence, and information security.
Business intelligence – often driven by big data projects – enhances the need for increased IT processing capabilities and speed. Employees are increasingly demanding access to data, intelligence and business processing at any time, from any location and from any device. The cloud facilitates access independence and improved processing capabilities in a more robust, scalable manner in a shorter, less expensive timeframe.
Similarly, ever proliferating security threats – in part compounded by remote access and bring your own device challenges – further increases the drive towards the cloud. Most cloud environments are automatically updated with the latest operating systems, security patches and threat detection software in a time sensitive manner, which removes responsibility for such activities from already constrained in-house technicians.
The multidirectional interaction between these and other business processes demonstrates why these 3 – more than others – are priorities of CIOs for 2017.
HR Headaches
However, growing capabilities in the big 3 priority areas is not without its challenges.
Foremost among them are a lack of mature off the shelf solutions, requiring in house development. Further, finding the talent to build and support a digital ecosystem remains challenging. Tech talent in these emerging areas need not only advanced technical skill in existing, established disciplines, but an agile facility to research, learn and adopt new ones that might be less well documented. Finding – and keeping – IT resources with this skill set is increasingly difficult as demand for their unique capabilities increases.
How SRI Can Help
SRI Infotech invites you to learn more about how we can help your organization move forward on the Digitization Continuum. By combining our unique, enterprise ready solutions to some of the biggest IT challenges, including cloud deployment, Identity and Access Management and Big Data, with our highly qualified “staffing as a platform” team of technologists and business analysts, SRI can minimize your IT expenditures while improving your business performance.
Contact us today to learn more.