The analyst firm’s survey of global CIOs and technology executives finds that IT budgets are expected to increase 5.1% on average in 2023, but that is lower than the projected global inflation rate of 6.5%. Economic uncertainty, workforce issues and ongoing supply chain challenges are making their jobs even harder.

The bulk of the objectives for IT investments over the last two years were to improve operational excellence (53%) and customer or citizen experience (45%), while just 27% cited growing revenue as a primary objective. Similarly, just 22% said they wanted to improve cost efficiency with their technology investments.

CIOs are now being tasked with shifting their mindset and prioritizing digital initiatives with market-facing, growth impact, says Janelle Hill, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

“For some CIOs, this means stepping out of their comfort zone of internal back-office automation to instead focus on customer or constituent-facing initiatives,” Hill says.

However, Gartner says CIO’s future IT investments remain focused on optimization rather than growth, with top areas of increased investment for 2023 including cyber and information security (66%), business intelligence/data analytics (55%) and cloud platforms (50%). However, just 32% are increasing investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and 24% in hyperautomation.

Those CIOs that are focused on market-facing growth are more likely to leverage data, analytics and AI to detect emerging customer behavior or sentiment that represents a growth opportunity, Hill adds.

Gartner is also calling on IT leaders to reconcile siloed initiatives with a visual metrics hierarchy to communicate and demonstrate interdependencies across related digital initiatives. The firm’s study found that 95% of organizations struggle with developing a vision for digital change, largely due to competing expectations from different stakeholders.

To help accelerate delivery of IT investments, technology leaders need to be accountable and hold others accountable, according to Gartner. Hill uses the example of a digital investment designed to improve customer experience and profit margins. In this scenario, the CIO’s accountable partner would be the marketing or finance executives.

CIOs should connect with other leaders in their organization for each digital initiative to create metrics for that improvement and identify the chain of accountability.

Gartner also found that organizations have an over-dependence on IT staff for delivery of their tech investments, as 77% of CIOs said their IT staff is primarily responsible for providing innovation and collaboration tools, and just 18% said non-IT personnel provide those tools.

That mindset can impede agility, and CIOs must embrace democratized digital delivery by design to help accelerate that time to value. That strategy could include loaning IT staff to fusion teams that combine business experts, business technologists and IT that are focused on achieving digital business outcomes and opens the door to integrate business experts into a reciprocal IT-led fusion team.

CIOs continue to report challenges hiring and retaining IT talent needed to accelerate those digital initiatives, but some are looking at unconventional resources.

According to Gartner, 12% are using students through internships and relationships with schools, and 23% use gig workers.

“Talent shortages are among the greatest hindrances to digital,” says Sanchez Reina, VP analyst at Gartner. “CIOs are often limited by policies related to preferred providers or employment contracts. They must stress to business and HR leadership that engaging unconventional talent sources can help accelerate the realization of digital dividends.”

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John-David Lovelock, a distinguished research vice president at Gartner, says inflation and currency exchange rates are not expected to deter CIOs’ investment plans for 2022. “Organizations that do not invest in the short term will likely fall behind in the medium term and risk not being around in the long term,” said Lovelock, in a statement.

With price increases and delivery uncertainty, CIOs, and enterprises in general, are shifting from ownership to service models. In 2021, there was 18.4% growth in cloud spending. In 2022, cloud spending is expected to grow 22.1%. Gartner says the cloud service demand is reshaping the IT service industry, but it is also driving spending on servers as hyperscalers build out their data centers.

Spending on data center systems is expected to have the strongest growth of all segments in 2022, according to Gartner. Cloud consulting and implementation and cloud managed services are expected to grow 17.2% in 2022, from $217 billion in 2021 to $255 billion in 2022, helping to drive the overall IT services segment to 6.2% growth in 2022.

IT Talent Shortage Affects IT Spending

Gartner predicts the IT skills shortage to ease by the end of 2023. By that time, the corporate drive to complete digital transformation will slow down, leaving time for more upskilling and reskilling of existing staff. However, Gartner notes in the near term, CIOs will be forced to take action to balance increased IT demand and dwindling IT staffing levels.

Gartner’s Global Labor Market Survey in the first quarter of 2022, showed compensation as the number one driver for IT talent attraction and retention. Tech service providers are increasing prices to allow for competitive salaries; in turn, thus will driven an increase in spending in software and services through this year and next year. Gartner says worldwide software spending is expected to grow 9.6% to $806.8 billion in 2022 and global spending on IT services is forecast to reach $1.3 trillion.

“Additionally, CIOs are using more IT services to assist in the lack of skilled IT staff. Tasks that require lower skill sets tend to be outsourced to managed service firms to alleviate staff time, while critical strategy work, which requires high-end skills unobtainable by many enterprises, will increasingly be fulfilled by external consultants,” said Lovelock.

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The concerns about insecure work environments that have plagued IT departments since the pandemic-driven work-from-home trend that emerged in 2020 hasn’t gone away, according to PwC.

CIOs fear not having effective cybersecurity measures in place when it comes to continuing hybrid work. Twenty-eight percent of  CIOs worry about not having the right technology tools to support hybrid work. About 49% rank data analytics as the most important capability for supporting the future of work.

Executive teams may not be fully aligned around the potential risks of a hybrid model. CIOs and other risk management leaders should work together to help close the gap between the perception and reality.

Related: How To Communicate Cybersecurity To The Board

No organization or industry sector is immune from cyberattacks — as we’ve seen in some high-profile cases like the Colonial Pipeline, T-Mobile and SolarWinds hacks. Even small organizations and school systems are seeing disruptions to their work and data protection.

Cybersecurity firm KELA’s report cited activity from July 2021 that indicated ransomware attackers prefer organizations in specific geographies and markets and prefer very specific products for initial network access.

Technology Challenges with a Hybrid Model

Around 43% of CIOs see data privacy, cybersecurity and compliance as the most pressing technology challenges they face with a hybrid model.

Ransomware, phishing and malware continue to loom over organizations. Employees altering from working from home to the corporate office are using unsecured devices to access enterprise networks via unsecured connections.

One-third of tech leaders mentioned shadow IT as a challenge. Hybrid work has led staffers to take technology matters into their own hands to meet their needs. Users might download cloud-based storage services without the approval or even knowledge of IT.

Concerns about high turnover and network security following cyberattacks still lingers. “To keep operations running smoothly through these high volumes of resignations and turnover almost half of CIOs plan to make changes in their processes to make organizations less dependent on employee institutional knowledge,” said Joe Nocera, leader of PwC’s Cyber & Privacy Innovation Institute to TechRepublic.

The survey did note the challenges facing technology executives at large global enterprises are likely to be different than those at much smaller companies.

“The difficulty of managing the tech needs of a hybrid workforce of a few hundred people is nothing like overseeing tens of thousands of workers in various parts of the world,” says PwC.

CIOs & The Future of IT Organizations in Hybrid Work Environment

About 46% of CIOs and CTOs surveyed indicated their department is expected to rely more on outsourcing, such as contingent workers and third-party vendors.

Technology executives continue to struggle with the talent gap, particularly  when it comes to skills in analytics, data science, cybersecurity, cloud and other areas of IT.

With an increase in working with external vendors, tech leaders needs to be attentive to the compliance, adequate controls and transparent reporting from third parties.

More executives are learning towards more automation to free up employees rote tasks to more strategic activities based on the organizations changing business conditions.

Regardless, almost every IT department is expected to be making changes as result of the pandemic and hybrid work based on company experience in the coming months.

The post CIOs Are Switching Strategies Amid Hybrid Work Challenges appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Gartner, organizations with diverse IT-business collaborations will deliver business outcomes 25% faster than their competitors.

Automating processes is often key to accelerating these business outcomes. Process automation – i.e., digitizing processes with dedicated business applications that enable task and workflow automation – thus becomes the low-hanging fruit for digital transformation, allowing CIOs to better align IT with the organizations’ business strategy.

Related: How to Achieve Alignment Between Business & IT for Your Automation Projects

For organizations, business process automation is critical to ensuring business continuity, lowering costs, increasing margins, and reducing errors and risks. It can also improve staff morale and creativity due to a reduction in chaotic and inefficient processes. But what about the impact on the CIO and the larger IT team?

While the benefits of process automation for organizations are abundant, pursuing automation projects can deliver direct benefits for the CIO too, including:

#1 Gaining business user allies through tactical task automation

Today’s business users often need help automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks; the sort of things often handled using emails, spreadsheets, or physical paper clutter.

Though some business process automation projects are indeed pushed from the top down as part of the organization’s global strategy, a large number of them are driven bottom-up by the needs of these business users.

The “citizen development” movement – encouraging non-IT-trained employees to use low-code / no-code platforms to create business applications – seemed attractive but has proved difficult to make work and has often fallen short of expectations.

Very few citizens have the talent – let alone the desire – to build applications, and the ones who do often find it conflicting with their primary duties. When it does work, it’s usually short-cycle, short-lifespan efforts for personal tasks. Projects beyond that small, short scope require greater skills and/or access to curated resources.

In other words – it’s almost impossible to bypass IT. But it is possible to improve and augment them. And it is possible to optimize their efforts.

While IT continues to work on shared-value projects, CIOs can have them coordinate and orchestrate those small, personal, short-term tactical efforts users can do for themselves.

Procuring and promoting the use of the right tools, so IT is seen as the facilitator of citizen activity, not its nemesis, produces quick wins, yields goodwill, and whets appetites for larger-scale efforts.

That’s important because those large-scale efforts will only succeed through the collaboration of users and IT.

#2 Showing tangible evidence of productivity

Regardless of the IT project, business leaders always want to know: how can we determine, deliver on, and measure the key business outcomes of this project?

While it can be difficult to quantify the successes of simple task automation and data management efforts, process-oriented solutions typically have outcomes that are highly measurable, and thus reportable (the volume or pace of loan applications processed, for instance). Simply put, business process automation empowers CIOs to demonstrate ROI.

When the road to success on long-term, strategic IT projects (whether related to IT infrastructure, the ERP exchange, or something else) gets bumpy, being able to present process automation quick wins that positively impact the overall business becomes an ace up the CIO’s sleeve.

#3 Turning “can’t” into “can”

Building and maintaining business applications doesn’t have to consume a large number of up-front resources or require orchestrating a cacophony of otherwise-disconnected moving parts before a single step can be taken.

When CIOs treat business applications as process automation projects, they can begin with the work to be done, not the assets to be managed.

When approached with an agile mindset based on continuous feedback, business process automation enables the CIO to quickly deliver applications that are consistent, maintainable, and can evolve over time to include ambitious assets.

But along the way, such efforts yield regularly expanding positive results. That persistent positive sentiment is invaluable to gaining trust among business stakeholders.

#4 Delivering more value to the C-Suite

The modern CIO is ultimately responsible for not only creating a healthy IT infrastructure, but also efficient information dissemination that empowers the C-suite to make better decisions faster and execute them effectively.

Often processes are assumed, inferred, and ad-hoc. While a process might exist, it might have inconsistent outcomes and be poorly understood – which means efforts to improve it might be doomed before they begin.

Often, a benefit of automating a process is to formally document it for the first time – which then starts the journey toward better efforts and outcomes.

With workflow automation, processes become visible, transparent, well-governed, standardized, and auditable, meeting that requirement by providing management with strategic insights, indispensable to corporate growth.

This solidifies the CIO’s role as not just a valued member of the strategic leadership team, but a change instigator, turning digital transformation strategy into reality to create a modern workplace that improves how people work and how the company operates.

By stepping outside the confined IT role, the CIO can help drive true innovation and transform the company into a data-driven enterprise.

In conclusion

I never need to hear about “saving time and money” or buzzwords like “streamlined efficiency” again. It’s not that those terms, and those goals, don’t matter – they do – but at this point, they’re a baseline expectation.

What matters is where you’re saving time and money through streamlined efficiency, how you’re choosing to do it to, and what long-term cumulative cultural changes will happen within your organization as a result.

Only CIOs who balance business and technical skills are in a position to get this right.

The post 4 Ways Process Automation Pays Off for the CIO appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Due to remote work, a constant barrage of sophisticated cyberattacks, the evolving threat of ransomware and an entirely new end user operating system the last year and a half has flipped the IT industry on its head and has demanded more from technology professionals than ever more.

IT teams have never been relied upon to keep businesses up and running and safe from threats as they are now, and that could lead to burnout due to all that extra work.

Tech stress rising

Several recent studies help paint the picture of the stressors leading to burnout amongst technology professionals.

According to a September 2020 survey of CIOs from Harvey Nash and KPMG, the mental health of IT teams has taken a toll since the pandemic. The survey found that 84% of IT leaders are concerned about the mental health of their tech teams due to the pandemic, and 60% of IT leaders have added programs to support their staff.

Unify Square released the results of a survey in November 2020 of 600 full-time enterprise employees, technology workers are taking the brunt of the stress, as 61% of tech workers say their stress levels have risen since working remotely.

Clearly, stress levels continue to rise among IT departments, and that can stem from how those professionals are viewed from a business lens.

Read Next: My TechDecisions Podcast Episode 126: Managing Cybersecurity Stress

IT is a thankless job

Unfortunately, most organizations don’t think of their IT department as a critical piece of their organization. When things are working and going well, nobody notices the good work you’re doing. On the flipside, everyone notices when things don’t work or when your systems are encrypted, and you have to pay a six-figure ransom.

According to Grant Wernick, CEO and co-founder of automated cybersecurity data intelligence firm Fletch, that can be emotionally and mentally draining on IT professionals.

“Most organizations don’t understand that their IT departments are having to adapt at significant rates in order to keep up with our cloud-driven world—especially because of COVID-19,” Wernick says. “Leaders within organizations need to give more public attention to the work these team members are doing—especially leaders outside of the IT department.”

Instead, IT needs to be looked as an important business need and not just the department that troubleshoots the tech issues of end users and installs boatloads of security software throughout the organization. According to Wernick, companies need to make sure that every department understands why IT plays such a critical role.

Rather than looking at IT as an expense that needs to be managed, companies should consider IT as a strategic investment.

We need to look at IT differently

In 2021, there are very few businesses that can conduct their business and survive without technology, but the perception that technology is just a support function remains because IT departments struggle to show the value they bring to the organization.

They are also not typically at the table when management discusses strategy and operations, according to Veronica Millan, global chief information officer at MullenLowe Group.

“Every organization today, if they haven’t already, needs to look around their executive management team and see if they have someone on that team that is truly representing the technology team – whether it’s a CIO, the head of Technology, the IT Director, whatever the appropriate title would be in that company,” Millan says. “If they don’t have a representative, then there’s a huge gap that needs to be addressed where technology is concerned.”

On the flipside, those IT professionals that do make it into the C suite need to remember that they work for a business, and businesses are driven by revenue and a balanced budget. They need to learn how to bridge the gap between the business and technology.

Millan called the pandemic a black swan that forced companies to grapple with their basic technology investments while employees were working at home and organizations had to rethink how they would deliver their services or products via that environment.

That necessitated a seat at the table for IT professionals, and they showed what they were capable of.

“There were these questions and so much more that needed to be considered that depended on technology,” Millan says. “For many, it was the first time that the technology teams had a seat at the table.”

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