Five priorities for CIOs in 2021

1 Regulatory compliance and security

The entry might have been num­ber one in the charts for the past few years, but the mass jump to work­ing away from the office catal­ysed by lock­down has meant chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers (CIOs) must be on top of data man­age­ment, secu­ri­ty and com­pli­ance. 

“The shift towards remote work and dig­i­tal oper­a­tions has meant the infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty pos­ture of many busi­ness­es, faced with an increas­ing amount of threats, has had to improve,” says Fed­eri­co Bal­do, CIO at Eurotech, a multi­na­tion­al com­pa­ny sup­ply­ing inter­net of things solu­tions.

“Secu­ri­ty starts at the top of an organ­i­sa­tion and, while chief exec­u­tives do not need to be secu­ri­ty experts, they do ben­e­fit from an accu­rate under­stand­ing of the rel­e­vance of secu­ri­ty to their organ­i­sa­tion. And for many small­er busi­ness­es, in par­tic­u­lar, it is the CIO’s job to lead the inter­nal secu­ri­ty pro­grammes.”

Car­o­line Car­ruthers, chief exec­u­tive of data strate­gists Car­ruthers and Jack­son and for­mer chief data offi­cer at Net­work Rail, says a mind­set trans­for­ma­tion is required. “My biggest piece of advice for CIOs when it comes to reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance is they need to stop think­ing about secu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy as a tick-box exer­cise,” she says. “It’s essen­tial they see this as a pos­i­tive oppor­tu­ni­ty rather than a hur­dle to over­come.”

There are enor­mous advan­tages for the organ­i­sa­tions that get com­pli­ance right, she insists, from increased cus­tomer trust to more secure intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty.

2 Modernise IT infrastructure and systems

COVID has test­ed the robust­ness of sup­ply chains, busi­ness mod­els and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems alike. In many cas­es, it exposed wor­ry­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. 

“After the imme­di­ate response to the pan­dem­ic, it allowed the time to look at IT sys­tems and assess whether they remained fit for pur­pose,” says Jean-Sébastien Pel­land, deputy man­ag­ing direc­tor of Eland Cables, a glob­al sup­pli­er of cables and cable acces­sories.

“Busi­ness­es con­stant­ly evolve, requir­ing IT sys­tems to adapt rather than mak­ing whole­sale changes, sim­ply due to the pace and per­haps uncer­tain­ty of the new avenues. Now is the time to make sure the sys­tems match the busi­ness as it stands today.”

This chimes with Sharon Man­dell, CIO of Juniper Net­works, a multi­na­tion­al cyber­se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny. “As we ‘cloud­i­fy’ and ‘SaaSi­fy’ our entire prod­uct line, Juniper also needs to update its IT archi­tec­ture. We need one that’s more nim­ble, that brings new capa­bil­i­ties and that’s more user aware to enable the expe­ri­ence our cus­tomers and part­ners desire through­out their jour­ney with us,” she says.

Like many organ­i­sa­tions, Juniper has piv­ot­ed its offer­ing, in part because of the pan­dem­ic fall­out. “Mod­ernising IT is a pri­or­i­ty now as many of our sys­tems were built around a busi­ness mod­el that deliv­ered hard­ware, with embed­ded soft­ware only, and tra­di­tion­al tech­ni­cal sup­port and ser­vices,” says Man­dell.

3 Ensure real-time visibility of critical data

“The world we’re liv­ing in is mov­ing faster than ever and organ­i­sa­tions rely­ing on data even one week old are behind the curve,” warns data strate­gist Car­ruthers. “The nature and speed of change in 2021 will make real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty of crit­i­cal data the sin­gle biggest fac­tor in win­ning new busi­ness across almost all indus­tries this year.” 

She advis­es that “CIOs need to make sure they have insight into what is going on in their indus­tries in real time” to make accu­rate pre­dic­tions.

Rich Murr, CIO at Epi­cor, a glob­al provider of enter­prise resource plan­ning soft­ware for the man­u­fac­tur­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion, retail and ser­vice indus­tries, agrees. He calls action­able data “the holy grail” of IT. “And some­times it’s seem­ing­ly just as dif­fi­cult to obtain,” he says. “The chal­lenge is less about sys­tems and more about the busi­ness process­es that pro­duce and con­sume the data. 

“CIOs need to edu­cate their busi­ness peers, not to sit back and expect clean data to appear mag­i­cal­ly in their sys­tems, but instead to take strong own­er­ship and exe­cute the hard busi­ness process improve­ment work nec­es­sary to cre­ate action­able data.”

4 Engage and educate the workforce

On Mur­r’s point of dri­ving edu­ca­tion and train­ing, so employ­ees can use all IT sys­tems capa­bil­i­ties and have a good han­dle on data man­age­ment, this is anoth­er impor­tant CIO task. “IT needs to work for the work­er,” says Tim Chris­tensen, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at work­force com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form Social­Cho­rus.

Foot­ball Asso­ci­a­tion CIO Craig Don­ald says: “Facil­i­tat­ing tech lit­er­a­cy will be cen­tral to my role in boost­ing enjoy­ment and attain­ment as the foot­ball com­mu­ni­ty comes back to life in 2021. Par­tic­u­lar­ly in non-tech organ­i­sa­tions, CIOs should­n’t just go in there being the mys­ti­cal gurus of tech­nol­o­gy. Get a dia­logue going and show how tech can direct­ly impact rela­tion­ships.”

Edu­cat­ing staff is par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing for Jo Drake, CIO of ecom­merce com­pa­ny THG that in Sep­tem­ber attract­ed the largest ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing on the Lon­don Stock Exchange since 2013. “As part of a glob­al busi­ness that is expand­ing at a rapid rate, it’s impor­tant to have the best team pos­si­ble and the right tal­ent to grow with us,” she says, point­ing to sev­er­al schemes that attract and nur­ture tech tal­ent.

5 Make full use of cloud computing

Eurotech CIO Bal­do urges busi­ness­es to “go full-on cloud”. He says: “If the busi­ness gross mar­gin is not sen­si­tive to slight­ly high­er costs, there are many more advanced and inte­grat­ed secu­ri­ty capa­bil­i­ties that small­er busi­ness­es can lever­age through the use of cloud ser­vices from AWS, Azure, Google or IBM than could be achieved on-premise, with­in the same bud­get.” It is the CIO’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to man­age the move to the cloud and beyond.

Dr Anjali Sub­bu­raj, chief archi­tect of dig­i­tal com­merce at multi­na­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­er Mars, believes busi­ness­es can move up a lev­el in this area. “Adop­tion of cloud com­put­ing allows IT teams to focus exclu­sive­ly on dri­ving busi­ness out­comes via their endeav­ours instead of grap­pling with IT infra­struc­ture issues,” she says. 

Once the cloud is embraced, more tech oppor­tu­ni­ties become acces­si­ble. “CIOs should also be pri­ori­tis­ing the intro­duc­tion of an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-embed­ded approach,” Sub­bu­raj adds. “This will improve the accu­ra­cy and rel­e­van­cy of out­puts, such as sup­ply and demand, and per­son­alised prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions to con­sumers.”