In the digital world, the speed of a business is now the key differentiator in a highly competitive market. For chief information officers (CIOs) to take the company forward, they should consider the speed of their business as well as time to market.
That was the word from Stephen Elliot, research VP at market analyst firm IDC, speaking during the IDC South Africa CIO Summit, yesterday in Johannesburg.
"The speed of business today demands CIOs become ever-more agile, resilient, secure and innovative," he said.
Highlighting the most important technology agendas for CIOs in 2015, Elliot said every organisation needs to be technology-driven for market differentiation.
"Today it's all about speed, as business speed trumps cost-savings. Look at the achievements made by companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix. These are organisations that have built their business architecture around technology."
Competitive strategy
CIOs must put a "competitive strategy" in place if they are to be successful. According to Elliot, by 2016, 65% of global competitive strategies will require real-time third platform IT-as-a-service.
IDC defines the third platform as IT that is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networks and big data analytics.
With the third platform in mind, Elliot noted, organisations must have a self-service focus for more personalised customer-centric services.
Security
He pointed out that with the adoption of the third platform, security is high on CIOs' agendas. By 2016, he said, security will be a top three business priority for 70% of global CEOs.
Elliot believes the adoption of a "mobile-first" culture by organisations will heighten the customer privacy agenda, from a governance and compliance point of view. "Security and mobility are the top two strategic investment areas for CIOs in Africa.
"Organisations must elevate security to senior executive responsibility and include the chief security officers in cross-functional governance."
Application provisioning
To ensure speed of business, CIOs must also prioritise application provisioning, Elliot pointed out. By the end of this year, he predicted, 60% of CIOs will use DevOps as their primary tool to address the speed of sprawl of mobile, cloud and open source applications.
For application provisioning, he said IT's culture requires leadership that accepts the idea of failure to optimise business value.
He urged CIOs to focus on speed and quality of applications, as well as allow faster processes to provide services at the pace of business demands.
"Manage outcomes, not methods, to embrace open source and other development alternatives. Integrate development and deployment with both business and technical metrics to track success."
Big data
Enterprise data, or big data, will also be on the agenda for most CIOs, Elliot declared, adding by 2018, 30% of CIOs of global organisations will have rolled out an enterprise data and analytics strategy.
"Big data requires business executives to improve their technological acumen," he stressed. "CIOs must create data governance and stewardship responsibilities, as well as frameworks in concert with business owners and security."
He encouraged CIOs to "feed analytics with data architecture that integrates existing and new big data within a consistent framework. Provide traceability from source to usage, and rigorously assess the value of data sources."
Infrastructure transformation
Infrastructure transformation is another aspect CIOs have to consider if their business is to be speedy.
"By 2017, 35% of vendor sourcing relationships around third platform technologies will fail, causing CIOs to roll out new sourcing processes."
This will lead the CIO to become a service broker and chief technology economist who creates comprehensive due diligence processes and standards to identify and mitigate technology, financial and security risks.
"For infrastructure transformation, CIOs must also look to the cloud as a potential migration strategy and plan for deployment limitations, cost analysis and exit strategy. They must re-evaluate current vendor relationships and expectations; reorganising changes in vendor strategies often has a negative impact on IT's ability to deliver successful projects."
Share