A number of CIOs were interviewed by SearchCIO about their biggest IT challenge of the last year and what they said was interesting.
The CIOs of both Fidelity Investments and Daimler trucks both saw their biggest challenge was in dealing with the pace of IT change. With so many different opportunities for new initiatives (Cloud, Mobile, Big Data, Social/Collaborative etc) what do they concentrate on. As soon as one technology appears and makes its way onto the IT implementation agenda another, perhaps better one is on the horizon.
Some of these technologies are not just improvements in tools for the existing workforce but involve business transformation. This creates a further problem, as identified by the CIO at AT&T and that is ‘Leadership prioritisation’ – only a certain amount of business transformation can be attempted at any point in time and periods of stability are needed to reap the benefits of improved performance resulting for transformation initiatives.
Dieter Haban, CIO at Daimler trucks noted that they are ideally looking to ‘implement great things fast’ while Brook Colangelo, CIO at HMH Technology Group said that his problem is convincing other that ‘Perfection shouldn’t be a goal in an organisation trumpeting an Agile mind set’. Having just read Steve Jobs’ autobiography I would perhaps take issue with Brook but his comments and Dieter’s seem to also map back to a core problem of keeping up with the opportunities presented by the pace of IT change.
Getting and keeping good technology staff was a core problem for Equinix, an IT Service provider whilst balancing strategic priorities with regulatory demands was a challenge for Cancer Treatment Centres of America. Finally dealing with Murphy ’s Law was mentioned, but then again what’s new – stuff has always happened.
So what can be learned from these useful insights?
Improving organisational IT capabilities and broader business agility to enable the fast delivery of new technologies and associated change has never been more important. Perhaps some organisations, particularly those for which IT is not their core business, who also struggle with retaining IT talent would be better served to outsource more IT services to help achieve this agility.
It has never been more important that the complete IT Governance process is also agile if an organisation is to make the right IT moves. Decisions on technology strategies needs to be driven from business priorities and leadership priorities need aligned. These decision making processes need to involve the right people and be agile and iterative. Too often they are neither of these and require an overhaul.
IT budget limitations, unusually for these sort of surveys, were not mentioned but this will also be a key issue for many. Taking a much closer look at the existing resources and spend needed to retain the IT ‘business as usual’ operation is often something that is not done well by IT Departments themselves and an external expert review is often more effective.
ITSS helps mid-sized organisations in the UK and Ireland make the #rightITmoves and #TightenITbudgets. Follow us on Twitter @ITSSLLP or our web site www.itssllp.com
