According to Lenovo‘s annual study of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), despite global economic uncertainty and budgetary constraints in the IT sector, CIOs remain confident in technology’s ability to benefit their organizations.
The Resilient CIO: Lenovo Global Study of CIOs 2023
The dangers do exist, though, as 83% of respondents are concerned about not having enough money to spend on innovation and digital transformation, and over half (48%) are “extremely” or “very” concerned.
The annual Lenovo Global Study of CIOs, now in its second year, showed that CIOs (48%) are also more inclined to give priority to innovation in new technologies than to improving their present tech stack.
The stakes are high, with 60% of CIOs indicating that a freeze in innovation investment would have an immediate or short-term impact on their firm in areas such as business automation, business model transformation, data analytics, and environment, social, and governance activities. Furthermore, 33% of CIOs believe their organization is not robust enough.
According to Michael Ngan, Country General Manager of Lenovo Philippines, the role of the CIO has become extremely demanding. “As the technology landscape becomes more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging for CIOs to implement digital transformation across the organization and prioritize initiatives and investments that yield positive business results,” he shared.
It is not surprising that CIOs are choosing “as a Service” (aaS) options for their tech stacks because doing so allows IT directors to concentrate on innovation and be more responsive to the changing demands of their enterprises.
The majority of CIOs are aware of the advantages of a pay-as-you-go consumption model, which frees up CIOs and IT teams to concentrate on innovation or more strategic imperatives from procurement to infrastructure deployment and administration to hardware and licensing.
Over the next two years, the great majority (92%) of CIOs plan to expand their tech stacks with new aaS solutions. This comes after 71% of CIOs stated that 11% to 50% of their IT is presently provided as a service.
More than half of CIOs report that they employ software, infrastructure, and devices as a service substantially more frequently than they did the year before.
Organic and AI opportunities for IT leaders
Two crucial needs were identified by the analysis. The first is the growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI/ML) as mainstream IT objectives, which is driving innovation ambitions. The success of a firm depends on its ability to recruit and retain talent, thus the second area of possibility relates to people.
As CIOs expand their job to digitize operations across departments, talent-related duties including recruiting and retention (59%), managing a remote workforce (59%), managing multinational teams (58%), and diversity, equality, and inclusion (55%) continue to pose substantial difficulties for CIOs.
