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Today’s CIOs are becoming instrumental in leveraging technology to drive business growth. Here’s our take on emerging priorities for CIOs and how they can address the same.
The Premise
The days when an organization’s CIO was responsible for managing and maintaining its internal tech needs are long over. With technology becoming pervasive and data powering business decisions, CIOs have the mandate to harness digital tech, data, and insights and drive strategic business decisions. Technology today is the center of increased productivity, faster time-to-market, enhanced customer experience, and the competitive edge of an organization. Needless today, this puts CIOs front and center of the modern business landscape.
CIOs Now Have a Seat at the High Table
As technology permeates all functions to drive enterprise growth, the Chief Information Officer’s (CIO) role is expanding sharply and now includes higher stakes at the table. CIOs are emerging as changemakers who are instrumental in fuelling enterprise innovation, transforming operations, and establishing key differentiators for the organization. A new IDG research suggests that CIOs today act as strategic advisors (58%) within an organization and proactively identify business needs and opportunities. This is a significant rise from last year, where just 28% of lines of business considered CIOs to be strategic advisors. The report also found that this higher responsibility entrusted to the CIOs is due to the increased focus on digital transformation, and greater visibility within the organization is expected to continue. With CIOs focusing on developing a technology roadmap that aligns with business strategy, the emphasis continues to be on IT operations and performance with a keen effort on improving agility and enhancing customer experience. So, what really are the modern CIO’s priorities? And how can a proven tech partner, like Xebia, leverage wide-ranging capabilities to help them shine?
CIO Priority 1: Having a Deft Digital Strategy
We live in a hyper-digital world. Automating manual processes and leveraging new-age technology to maximize business performance and data intelligence is vital for organizational success and future readiness. Having a rich, well-architected digital strategy and roadmap can help translate corporate aspirations into a reality. It underpins and drives new business models, products and services and provides the framework and direction a company should take to build a unique competitive edge with technology. In addition, it also outlines critical tactics required to execute digital change and achieve its objectives.
How Xebia Helps You Shine: Your digital strategy determines the shape of your success, and getting it right is non-negotiable. Xebia helps you assess, challenge, and redesign strategies and operating models, while developing the capabilities you need to become future-ready. We are adept at reinventing structure, culture, and technology and help you break down silos that hold back innovation. Besides building new business models and implementing new technology, we also help organizations create and foster a new mindset and advanced skillset by combining our proven expertise and execution experience across all levels.
CIO Priority 2: Staying in League with New-Age Tech Trends
Staying agile and competitive in today’s business landscape requires CIOs to be ahead of tech trends and adapt for enhanced outcomes. From customer data platforms and multi-cloud architectures to AI democratization and extreme automation—technology is reorganizing how we work and operate. What is also essential is to leverage technology to accelerate and unlock your full digital potential. For instance, CIOs can employ tech-driven approaches such as DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering to boost reliability and turn ideas into reality at an astonishing speed—right from code to deployment.
How Xebia Helps You Shine: At Xebia, we understand that developing and running software cannot stay separated and operate in silos. And we use DevOps to bring them into one autonomous product team responsible for the end-to-end process—from building the software to running it. With a strong focus on how these teams work together and the tools they need, it is increasingly about organizational structure, automating processes, and making IT work faster and more efficiently to serve the business better.
CIO Priority 3: Ensuring Extreme Agility, Speed, and Cost optimization
Be it upgrading legacy systems or implementing new ones, speed is of extreme importance along with minimal business disruption if businesses are to stay ahead of the curve. Also, given that the demand for business applications is 5X higher than current IT skillsets and capacity, having a robust low-code/no-code strategy is emerging as the go-to solution to deal with this challenge. Low-code/no-code platforms can potentially transform how applications and software are developed by enabling people closest to the customers and business users to build solutions and experiences with minimal involvement from IT. It allows developers to build components that accelerate the product delivery by 10-20 and enable high ROI, delivering scalable, secure, and future-ready applications.
How Xebia Helps You Shine: With our deep domain experience in both horizontal and vertical solutions and strong Appian and Salesforce footprints, Xebia has delivered over 1000 enterprise solutions and has nearly 90 happy clients across industries. Our knowledge and experience on Appian and Salesforce platforms help enterprises achieve digital implementation up to 30% faster with industrial reliability and quality.
CIO Priority 4: Committing to Cloud and Sustainability
Climate impact, sustainability, and circularity are emerging as critical business objectives for new-age and responsible organizations. And this is one area where CIOs can show immediate and tangible impact by migrating to the cloud. According to AWS, “average corporate data centers have a dirtier power mix than the typical large scale cloud provider.” Besides driving a substantially high degree of flexibility and anytime, anywhere data availability, the cloud is the most preferred way for organizations to shift to green IT. Research suggests that users consume 77% fewer servers, 84% less power, and reduce carbon emissions by 88% by migrating to the cloud.
How Xebia Helps You Shine: With a keen understanding of the technology and by assessing your business goals, we help you get the most out of your cloud implementation. Xebia has helped many first-time movers and digital native organizations optimize their cloud platforms. We offer the flexibility to choose from any of the four biggest cloud providers and help you reach out to new markets and gain a whole new level of success while meeting your organization’s sustainability goals.
CIO Priority 5: Enabling Agile Transformation
Modern CIOs have a unique opportunity in evolving their agile processes to transform how businesses and technologists collaborate and drive results. Agile transformation goes beyond scrum and sprints to include distributed, new ways of working. It involves redefining the enterprise IT architecture, leveraging agile teams, and building agile capabilities to address strategic priorities. Successful agile transformation is essential for a sustainable competitive edge and enabling organizations to adapt and thrive in the next normal.
How Xebia Helps You Shine: With more than two decades of experience in helping organizations adopt agile ways of working, we have enabled businesses to become highly flexible, accelerate time-to-market, save expenses and time, and significantly enhance employee satisfaction. From easy scaling to swiftly innovating, our agile transformation capabilities—with certifications spanning Scrum, Lean, Less, SAFe, Spotify, and more—ensure that your company is future-ready. No matter where you are in your agile journey, we assess your status quo, implement change, and transfer knowledge to ensure that you continue independently.
CIO Priority 6: Bridging Talent Gaps and Retention
With both business and technology evolving at an unprecedented speed, building an an IT department that can stay abreast with or, better still, stay ahead of this evolution is vital to ensure continued success. And hence, hiring, training, and retaining the right talent will always be a priority for the CIO. The right people with the correct skillset will help improve internal IT effectiveness and productivity and support business functions to make better decisions to run and grow the company. It is also critical that employees continue to upskill themselves in necessary technologies to future-proof their careers and arm them with relevant skills.
How Xebia Helps You Shine: The Xebia Academy is a key instrument to tackle today’s digital skills gap by upskilling your workforce. As technology evolves rapidly and given that digital transformation is here to stay, up- and reskilling your workforce is vital to remain aligned to dynamic business goals. Investment in data, cloud, and engineering can be maximized only when we continuously work at reducing the skills gap. Xebia assists in this crucial skills-building process by offering comprehensive, well-scaled learning journeys for beginners, professionals, and experts in IT, Agile/Scrum, Data and AI, Product Management, DevOps and Cloud. Together with our customers, we work on closing the skills gap as organizations invest in innovative technologies essential to growing.