6. Public cloud adoption expands

Over the past few years, most of the focus on moving to the cloud has been around adoption of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS as companies look to leverage the efficiency, scale, and elasticity of cloud services to optimize their spend and reduce cycle times, Pace Harmon’s Singh says. In 2020, the focus will shift more to enabling innovation.

“Cloud service providers have been building out intelligent automation and service capabilities on analytics, AI and machine learning, and customer engagement, to name a few, which enables enterprise IT organizations to accelerate adoption of these capabilities and quickly drive business value,” Singh explains. IT leaders will want to look at how they can leverage public cloud capabilities to accelerate value rather than investing time and money building them internally, he advises.

7. New digital transformation metrics will emerge

“The reality is, many digital transformations fail because companies aren’t integrating their business and technology strategies from the start,” says ServiceNow’s CIO Chris Bedi. “But it’s imperative that CIOs know how to quantify their progress with AI and digitization technologies and understand how to effectively communicate this value to key stakeholders.”

In 2020 and beyond, Bedi predicts, CIOs will develop more methodical evaluation criteria for digital projects, focused on measuring proficiency across three key areas:

• Velocity: The speed of processes and how quickly work gets done
• Intelligence: The ability of analytics to automate and improve decision effectiveness
• Experience: Experiences that drive the right behavioral and economic outcomes

8. IT takes the long view on digital insights

Unfortunately, many early digital initiatives were reactive responses to a need in the moment. At this point in time, however, it makes more sense to take a step back at the start of new projects to ensure they deliver maximum value.

“IT leaders should embrace what we call ‘insight-first” innovation,” says BDO’s Laroia. “’Insight-first’ innovation focuses not only on solving the immediate need, but also on maximizing the long-term potential of organizational data. By intentionally building in data capture, every digital initiative presents an opportunity to improve and democratize business intelligence across the enterprise.”

[ Get answers to key digital transformation questions and lessons from top CIOs: Digital transformation cheat sheet. ]

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