I spend a fair amount of time meeting with CIOs in the region, discussing their businesses and hosting a pair of CIO peer-to-peer groups. The conversations are always very interesting as they share challenges, successes and future visions.<\/p>\n
Naturally, there\u2019s a lot of consistency from year to year, for example cyber security will ALWAYS be a priority.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s never a shortage of new initiatives, strategies and opportunities as well. There better be, right? Otherwise the CIO is probably not very good at their job!<\/strong><\/p>\n So, from my conversations over the past year, here are priority issues for 2019.<\/p>\n Nearly everyone is at one stage or another in deployment of Office 365, this ubiquitous Microsoft<\/a> product.<\/p>\n Interestingly, a common challenge expressed has more to do with user behavior than the software itself. That is, companies get to a successful roll-out and email is deployed but maximizing the ROI on it is proving elusive to most organizations.<\/strong><\/p>\n True collaboration and real business process change around the tool are the biggest impediments.<\/p>\n This topic has been top of mind for awhile and most CIOs are actively working it.<\/p>\n We\u2019re seeing more and more resources assigned to manage data<\/a>. It\u2019s generally understood that while companies produce mountains of data, it\u2019s largely unusable or not actionable without expert intervention.<\/strong><\/p>\n That said, a clear recognition exists that revenue growth and cost savings opportunities are hiding in that data. In most cases a solid ROI can be achieved with the right effort.<\/p>\n It may be a cliche, but it\u2019s often true: the only constant is change.<\/p>\n When people think of digital<\/a> disruption, it\u2019s often times centered on internet technologies, especially those that are sales and marketing oriented. But disruption is a diverse threat, or opportunity, depending on your perspective.<\/p>\n Naturally, labor intensive or manual, process-dependent organizations can find themselves in the cross-hairs of a tech disruption. Especially if a competitor enters with significant and overwhelmingly valuable automation.<\/strong><\/p>\n But they\u2019re not the only ones. Smart CIOs<\/a> from all industries are recognizing patterns in their own organization and their markets for signs of disruption potential.<\/p>\n For years I\u2019ve heard CIOs express frustrations over their roles in business innovation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Frequently sharing frustrations with a perceived role as order takers, keeping the lights on or worse, the \u201cparty of no\u201d when business lines looked for unique support.<\/p>\n But that role is changing as many CIOs are being tasked by their CEO to lead business innovation instead of merely supporting innovation efforts by business lines.<\/strong><\/p>\n This shift is difficult to make and requires rock-solid alignment of IT strategy to business strategy, restructuring of roles and significant cultural change in the organization.<\/p>\n Of course, these are just four areas that are consistently emerging.<\/p>\n Ongoing and critical areas still include tech talent, IT security and others, but increasingly those areas are table stakes for running an effective IT organization.<\/strong><\/p>\n Economic and political uncertainty notwithstanding, 2019 will definitely be an interesting year for IT leaders. I\u2019m looking forward to seeing how they tackle these challenges and others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We look at four challenges that CIOs will have to tackle in 2019. On the list: data, digital disruption, innovation leadership, and Office 365.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":220,"featured_media":25725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16539],"coauthors":[15503],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2024-07-22 08:50:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25716"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Office 365<\/h2>\n
Data, Data, Data<\/h2>\n
Digital Disruption<\/h2>\n
Innovation Leadership<\/h2>\n
Final Thoughts<\/h2>\n
Originally published on LinkedIn<\/a><\/h4>\n