Over the last three decades in this industry, I’ve seen many impressively disruptive waves of technology, but I have never witnessed as many waves hitting simultaneously as we are seeing today.
While we can and will pursue many of these, as CIOs in a hypercompetitive global environment, we have to catch the wave that makes the biggest impact on enabling the business and accelerating our revenue and business growth. In 2015, I predict the highest priority for CIOs is digitization.
As the digital economy pushes enterprises to analyze and solve problems faster, businesses are asking CIOs and IT professionals to help reduce complexities, improve synergies across organizations, and leverage existing information regardless of where it resides. For instance, my team is extending our data lake architecture capabilities to enable multiple organizations to make data-driven decisions and accelerate the value for the business like never before. To do this, CIOs and IT professionals must:
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- Start at “home” by automating and digitizing critical IT processes and services. This is essential for IT-as-a-Service to be successful.
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- Partner even closer with our businesses units to truly understand their requirements and how we can help them.
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- Take advantage of the analytical and data science knowledge and activities that have been surfacing throughout the company, so we leverage existing best practices and prioritize projects rather than reinvent the wheel.
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- Explore how we can build capabilities and flexibility into our data lake solution to allow users to incorporate more publicly available data into their analyses.
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- Capture and share all the incredible data science knowledge we have in the company to train and help our users to go beyond analysis paralysis and get the most out of the wealth of data.
- Build data-driven apps that simplify the experience for our users and allow them to have the information they need at their fingertips.
While we still love technology, CIOs are now strategists and business enablers. In 2015 and beyond, we must strive to help our companies differentiate their products and services; reduce development and sales cycles; and optimize business processes and performance. Digitization (and big data analytics) is essential.
