There are many challenges facing the CIO today: finding and retaining talent, a hybrid workforce and the resulting security issues, and supply chain shortages.
Meanwhile, CIOs are being asked to take on more than ever. They, and their teams, are becoming the facilitators of organizational strategy and innovation as IT is now largely responsible for digital employee experience.
On top of everything else, supply chain issues have dramatically impacted CIOs, who at times have struggled to acquire technology assets to address challenges and initiatives.
“Not only are they responsible for keeping their digital workplace teams on track for technological support, but they set the tone for how their team approaches strategic challenges,” says Yassine Zaied, chief strategy officer at Nexthink.
He says while the CIO role has always been on this path, the pandemic certainly sped up the timeline.
Joe Leonard, CTO of GuidePoint Security, adds what was once a primarily centralized environment has become much more of a distributed one.
This is due to the rapid adoption of the cloud during the pandemic, which changed the traditional IT landscape and how businesses work.
“Many organizations are now relying on a workforce, where much of it is working remotely,” he says. “To bring in the best talent, the CIO must consider hiring employees regardless of their location to fill the needs of the organization.”
Leonard points out that managing a hybrid workforce adds additional complexity and responsibility for the CIO.
“An employee working onsite versus an employee that works remotely are going to have different requirements to perform their daily job functions,” he says. “New technology may need to be evaluated to help enable employee productivity and collaboration with other team members and customers.”
As EY chief global innovation officer Jeff Wong explains, the pandemic gave leaders and workers permission to shift traditional thinking around work and redefined the tools employees need to be successful.
“CIOs have played a critical role in helping C-suite leadership identify new ways of work by recognizing what was possible through future-focused technologies that allow employees to work more effectively and efficiently -- regardless of their physical location,” he says.
With hybrid work here to stay and organizations continuing to ramp up technology investments, executive leadership will continue relying heavily on the CIO to lead technology operations across the enterprise.
This means CIOs must ensure an organization’s people continue to have the technology solutions and platforms to seamlessly collaborate across different rooms and physical spaces.
This means their office workspaces should be designed with inclusive and innovative tools, for example big screens for video conferences and rollable tablets for collaborative meetings.
“The CIO and IT security should be collaborating and working together on a comprehensive security strategy to protect any new IT assets that are added in the environment,” Leonard explains.
He points out cloud adoption, IOT, and the remote workforce have increased our attack surface and created more opportunities for malicious intruders to gain access to the network resources.
“It is imperative that the CIO and IT security work together on a strategy and test the security controls put in place to validate its effectiveness,” he says. “Each IT resource is now on the Internet and is a target, so it is important that the proper security controls are in place and tested.
