Digital adoption will accelerate this year as IT departments push forward to drive greater business value, according to a new report carried out by the Hackett Group.
Presenting key findings of the CIO Agenda: 2021 Key Issues report by the Hackett Group, Vishal Chopra, head of marketing, APAC MEA at Freshworks, said IT was accelerating its own transformation and increasingly acting as a strategic advisor to business.
The report found global CIOs’ top 10 priorities were:
- Securing IT data and systems, with risk greater than ever with a vastly expanded remote workforce.
- Acting as a strategic advisor to business. This has become a much higher priority than in 2020, with IT needing to guide the business in the coming year of experimentation, as companies seek stability and adapt to the new normal.
- Aligning skills and talent with changing business needs, sourcing talent wherever it is available.
- Cultivating a customer-centric, innovative IT culture.
- Accelerating IT’s digital transformation.
- Improving IT’s cost efficiency.
- Improving IT agility.
- Modernising IT application platforms.
- Optimising the deployment of IT resources across the organisation.
- Reducing and avoiding technology complexity.
Speaking during a webinar last week, Chopra noted that risk management and cyber security topped the list of enterprise priorities for 2021; accelerating enterprise digital transformation had moved from 7th to 2nd place, and enterprise data and analytics strategy was ranked third.
Polls of webinar participants aligned with these findings, with 40% saying their most important IT initiative for 2021 would be to revise and automate workflows to reduce manual dependencies, 18% aiming to improve the ability of data to enable business value, 18% planning to reduce technology complexity, 13% planning to upskill or reskill IT staff to better support business needs, and 8% planning to improve enablement of business resiliency.
Cybersecurity remains a top priority for all IT leaders, with 37% of webinar attendees stating that their second most important IT objective for 2021 was acting as a strategic partner to the business, 25% aiming to cultivate a customer-centric and innovative IT culture and 16% saying they wanted to align IT skills and talent to changing business needs.
Webinar panellist and CIO of Afrisam Louise van der Bank said: “IT leaders have to make sure that IT initiatives align 100% with what business needs to achieve in 2021. Everything we do must take the business forward, and we may need to tweak our priorities and choose our initiatives more carefully to align to the needs of business. We also need to identify factors inhibiting our ability to respond to change.”
She said CIOs’ top priorities this year would be security, risk management, continuity and sustainability; digitalisation and digitisation; and enabling the new normal for our businesses.
Kevin Wilson, GM Group IT at Stefanutti Stocks Construction, said there was no doubt that IT security should be top of mind.
“Unfortunately, many still see it as a separate discipline. Security should be integrated throughout the IT stack.”
He said enterprise digital transformation should also be top of mind this year, focused on driving business forward.
“With the current economic climate putting such pressure on business and employees, transforming their world into a digital world can alleviate this pressure. This is the year to double down and invest in transformation. If you take 1% of revenue and push it back into IT, you might gain 10% in revenues, efficiencies and opportunities. But it can be challenging going to the board and saying we can’t keep cutting budgets, we have to be investing.”
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