Animals adapt to changing habitats. Businesses must adapt to changing technology, like the cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things. CIOs regardless of industry need to be ready for the evolution. In an article for the Enterprisers Project, Michael Segal describes the three actions CIOs must take: observe, plan, and embrace.
Agility at Work
Observe entails that you “Survey your surroundings and anticipate ever-changing consumer demand and preferences.” You have probably heard the examples of Uber and Airbnb a hundred times by now, along with reminders of what happened to Blockbuster. Disasters of this magnitude are likely not headed to your business, but keeping tabs on the business landscape across different verticals is still critical. Innovation and disruptions seldom happen in a straight line, after all.
Next, planning equates to “Develop an agile business assurance strategy.” It goes beyond merely improving the equipment on hand. When new and useful technologies are identified, the CIO has to establish a timeline for implementing them to create new organizational capabilities. Segal adds this:
In many cases, service performance degrades over time and is related to interdependencies across IT domains. An effective risk mitigation strategy will enable CIOs to innovate with confidence, offer superb customer experience, increase their customer base and reduce their operational expenses – all of which results in increased revenue and profitability.
Lastly, to embrace is to “Use your new digital assets and the data they produce to deliver real-time data for critical business insights.” Examining data collected from network traffic could be especially fruitful for CIOs. They can use it to uncover trends in service usage that might then be incorporated back into strategic planning. Analytics can of course be applied in any number of esoteric capacities to yield new insights though. The great challenge for CIOs is having the vision to know where to begin the investigation.
You can view the original article here: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2016/10/3-ways-cios-must-adapt-thrive-world-digital-darwinism
