As 2015 winds to a close, it's a great time to reflect on how not only the role of CIO has evolved, but how the landscape of IT has evolved as well. In this week's edition of news for CIOs and IT pros, we bring you a collection of articles that present where CIOs have been this year, and what challenges and opportunities await in 2016.
New leadership mandates for CIOs
In an op-ed for SmartData Collective, Rick Delgado perfectly summarizes the mission for today's CIO. “CIOs need to be more in tune with the business objectives of their organizations than ever before. That requires CIOs to be a valuable player on the executive board, a credible voice that fellow executives will listen to. CIOs also need to learn the best ways to explain their ideas to those who may not be intimately familiar with new technological concepts. If a CIO can help people within the business understand why certain technologies will or won’t work, they will help their company grow and flourish,” he writes.
This need for closer IT and business alignment is also shared in a ComputerWeekly interview with BT Business CIO Colin Lees, in which he describes how he's using agile methodologies to fix relationships between IT and business while delivering results. The article also touches on another mandate for CIOs – to be more externally facing. “Lees says he is spending a lot of his time speaking at events, something he might have shied away from in his recent, technical past.”
Tech and talent challenges ahead
On the tech side of things, mobile and cloud will continue to present new opportunities for CIOs in 2016. In a Q&A with Ian Barker for BetaNews, Mark Lorion, chief product and marketing officer at mobile app management and security company Apperian, discusses the shift toward app-level security management to curb mobile challenges in the enterprise. And in TechTarget, Sarah Wilson shares the top five most important hybrid cloud storage lessons learned in 2015.
But even as the tech and the business pieces of the puzzle fall into place for CIOs, retaining talent continues to be a struggle, now and into the future. An article this week in CIO Magazine looks at the impact of an employee value proposition (EVP) on retention. The article explains that an EVP “goes beyond compensation to take into account all of the elements a company has to offer its employees-not just compensation, but also opportunities for career development, career path progressing and succession planning, work-life balance, culture and other company differentiators.”
This is our final weekly news roundup for the year. More curated articles for CIOs and IT pros to come in 2016, but in the meantime, keep up with real-time updates from The Enterprisers Project on Twitter and Facebook.
