The role of a CIO has evolved over the years to include new skills, such as developing digital business strategies.
A 2017 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey has found that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are playing an immense role in the digital transformation strategy of businesses.
Data was collected from 3 160 CIO respondents in 98 countries and in all major industries. Of these, 66 CIOs were from African countries and represented $3 billion of the $277 billion total spend in IT spending.
The survey showed that 45% of CIOs in Africa are either designing or delivering their company’s digital initiatives, while 13% are going beyond the delivery to scaling and harvesting the digital initiatives.
However, a majority of CIOs said they remained in the initial stages of their digital lifecycle as they were faced with a number of barriers. The biggest of these is the organisation’s culture followed by a lack of resources. As such, Tomas Nielsen, research director suggested that digital business is driving the need for new IT roles, including:
API Product Managers
Chief Analytics Officers
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In addition, the role of the CIO has evolved to include time spent in executive leadership teams. CIOs are increasingly involved in traditional business tasks such as cost optimization, building agility and developing business strategy and planning.
Businesses that want to thrive in the digital age need to allocate more budgets to IT – a need which is set to take priority in 2018. The CIOs indicated that they would be spending the highest amount of money in 2018 on business intelligence and analytics, cybersecurity and digitalization.
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In addition, Nielsen said that artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining more interest in business with CIOs indicating that AI is either on their radar or a medium to long-term plan.
The priority now should be for CIOs to increase investment in technologies that help organisations reach their business objectives, said Nielsen.
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