Advice for CIOs to hit the ground running in 2017

CIOs have read the predictions, they know the 2017 technology trends they are facing, and they have their priorities in order. Now that we are solidly into a new year, it’s time to start executing. In this week’s news roundup for IT leaders, we bring you advice that can help you get 2017 started on the right foot.

Don’t sacrifice quality for speed

That lesson comes from Tim Sheedy, principal analyst at Forrester, in an article for Forbes. He writes, “Unfortunately, QA and testing have too often been afterthoughts in the rush to Agile development. Your quality assurance and testing practices must adapt to digital business too – testing needs to be able to accelerate development – not slow it down. QA needs to focus on customer needs. The QA team need to speak the language of the customer, get involved with new technology projects at the ideation stage, line up and manage test data before it is required, and empower developers to do much of the testing themselves.” Sheedy argues that CIOs need to own this, and he provides five best practice tips for better testing.

Make your digital workplace work for everyone

Writing for ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe points out the key challenges of today’s digital workplace and explains why “providing an easy-to-understand and employ digital toolkit that's well thought-out genuinely matters in today's complicated and fast-moving work environments.” He goes on to write, “Our workers' digital toolkit is no longer a monolithic set of official apps and systems, but rather an ecosystem of solutions that must be brought together more dynamically, made accessible, secure, and safe, and evolved in a coherent manner. Most importantly, the result must made readily understandable and accessible to the average worker, as their digital skills are also improved to take advantage of the possibilities of todays new digital capabilities.”

Break free from traditional CIO chains

In ComputerWeekly, Cliff Saran cites the publication's annual IT Priorities survey to point out that while IT budgets are falling, CIOs are planning to spend more on cloud, and thinking about investing in technologies like IoT and machine learning. Saran posits that this may be a proof point that CIOs are breaking free of the chains imposed by traditional IT.

Become a coach

Forbes contributor Sabina Nawaz calls coaching the single most important leadership skill to thrive in an ever-changing environment. She writes, “As a leader, you can’t accurately predict the future, but you can increase the capacity of your organization to deal with an uncertain one. With the right approach, you can coach employees to become more resilient, stay grounded in ambiguity and learn through failure.” Her advice for leaders includes creating conditions for teams to experiment and fail, as well as encouraging individuals to learn a skill and pass it on, spreading new skills exponentially throughout the organization.

More news for CIOs

How to win the tech talent war in 2017 [Diginomica]

10 Tech trends that made the world better in 2016 [SingularityHub]