In this week's edition of news for CIOs and IT pros, we seek the answers to a few important questions for IT business leaders.
Enterprisers News: June 22-26, 2015
Why must CIOs and IT leaders lead digital disruption?
Business leaders cannot afford to ignore the fact that digital technology is changing everything for companies large and small. Yet, according to a new report from Cisco and the International Institute of Management Development, nearly half (45 percent) of companies do not believe that digital disruption deserve board-level attention and (43 percent) do not see it as a risk.
Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon may have put it best: “organizations can't bury their heads in the sand and survive.” The report, entitled “Digital Vortex: How Digital Disruption is Redefining Industries,” backs up this sentiment, predicting that digital disruption will displace 40 percent of industry incumbents within the next five years.
Related:
- Technology Spectator - The five-fold path to disruption from Fergus O'Reilly, SAP
- Economic Times - $50 billion investment on 'digital transformation' to drive growth for banks: Polaris
- CMO - A story of digital reinvention at Simplot
How can CIOs drive competitive advantage?
IT has come a long way; from primarily behind the scenes and tasked with reducing costs, IT is now front and center – with an ever expanding to-do list. Opportunities for revenue generation and competitive differentiation with innovative IT are ripe for the taking. In an article for Forbes, Joe Weinman, author of Cloudonomics, outlines four strategies that all companies can leverage to exploit IT disruption for business advantage.
It may be no surprise that building better relationships with customers is part of Joe's list. Arlene Wherrett, APAC managing director at Bluewolf, takes this idea a step further in an article for CIO Magazine in which she argues that a “customer-obsessed” CIO can transform the business. She cites an end-to-end PaaS solution and cloud governance as two primary strategies for CIOs to drive competitive advantage.
More questions for CIOs
- How can CIOs lead measurable business change? James Butler, CTO of Trustmarque, says look to hybrid cloud implementations. The sooner the better.
- What's the latest conference buzz? Jay Fry of New Relic rounds up seven audience takeaways from Gartner's IT Operations Strategies & Solutions Summit. DevOps, cloud and containers were top of mind for attendees.
