5 CIO Trends to Keep Yourself in Check for 2022

Decisions made by CIOs in 2022 will have a significant impact on the route their company takes in a decade marked by disruption, innovation, and technology.

To aid in the development of successful digital strategies in the years ahead, we’ve identified five significant trends that every CIO should be aware of in order to make informed decisions in 2022:

1. A new era of cloud-based work

Enterprise cloud adoption has accelerated further and quicker than anyone could have imagined in the early 2020s, thanks to the massive disruption.

According to McKinsey, half of CIOs intend to migrate more than 75% of enterprise workloads to the cloud in the next two years, indicating that organizations are ready to shift gears into a new generation of cloud computing. As IT executives attempt to capture what McKinsey estimates to be more than $1 trillion in value, this new generation will witness a paradigm shift from IT leaders.

This new era strives to leverage on the cloud’s revolutionary value and platform-based work, rather than using it to make incremental improvements in employee and IT efficiency. The future of work is going to be dominated by cloud platform-based business models, according to an IBM research of organizations with a combined revenue of $3.7 trillion, which showed that 94% want to alter their operations to rely more on customer and employee experience platforms.

The savvy CIO would want to capitalize on this trend as soon as possible, turning to holistic, cloud-based intranet experience platforms that can cater to a wide range of use cases and workflows from across the organization.

2. Upskilling the hybrid workforce

In the coming decade, talent will be a valuable commodity, as remote work expands the talent pool and CEOs turn to IT to move businesses away from traditional systems and toward innovation. According to a Cisco survey of C-suite executives, 85%agree that in the all-digital workplace, the capacity to recruit, retain, and develop personnel would be crucial, but just 46% have plans in place to develop talent in 2022.

Digital natives – individuals who grew up in the information era and are thus equipped to flourish in a model that relies on remote work technologies – are more valued in hybrid work since it necessitates a new set of abilities. According to McKinsey, businesses must prioritize a new skill set for the future of work:

“In the next decade, increased demand for technological, social, and emotional skills will occur, while there will be a decline in roles that require physical, manual, or basic cognitive skills.” – McKinsey & Company

CIOs must assume responsibility for educating hybrid workforces in a new set of core competencies, including strategy, social responsibility, digital and cognitive capabilities, creative thinking, flexibility, and resiliency, to sustain a competitive advantage in a digital future of work.

CIOs and IT professionals must collaborate with HR to create training and development programs that allow employees to study when and where they want. All users should have access to an on-demand, self-service center for courses and materials. IT and HR will need to collaborate with other departments to ensure that upskilling opportunities are relevant for employees and add value to the company, upgrading a training model that appears to be becoming obsolete in the hybrid workplace.

3. Short-term fixes demand long-term rethinking

Technical debt is the result of decisions that put more emphasis on speed over quality, and is frequently the result of small fixes being prioritized over full-scale solutions. Many businesses are currently coping with the effects of technical debt incurred as a result of short-term investments in point solutions that aided them in surviving the pandemic. According to Gartner research, resolving technical debt will be high on CIOs’ wish lists in 2022 as they strive to achieve at least 50 percent faster service delivery timeframes to the business.

Enterprise strategies will transition from survival to growth in 2022, backing a shift from work-facilitating technologies to work-optimizing solutions. As a result of this transition, the CIO has a new set of difficulties that must be addressed by long-term IT strategies:

• Consolidate your technological investments to save money on IT.
• Employee app fatigue can be reduced by minimising digital friction.
• Improve your organization’s agility and resilience.
• Strengthen cybersecurity at the network’s edge as it grows.
• Shift away from traditional processes and toward approaches that are built on innovation.

Boards would want CIO to resolve technical debt and assume responsibility of a new architecture that addresses these issues while also ensuring that IT strategies remain flexible in the hybrid future of work. Experience platforms with the ability to integrate third-party solutions will play a critical role in streamlining an overly complicated digital ecosystem.

“CIOs who want to invest in new technology projects must provide a sense of certainty. Rather than big-bang investments, IT chiefs should encourage the board to spend on technology infrastructure upgrades that help stave off technical debt.” – Ernst & Young

The damage caused by investments in siloed systems can be mitigated by creating a single digital home for all IT. Enterprises’ only hope of unwinding the tangled web of interconnected tools and policies caused by technical debt is to consolidate processes, workflows, and systems into a holistic platform.

The roots of this strategic transformation are already sprouting, according to Forrester, which found that enhancing digital experiences and providing a unified perspective of digital tools and channels has risen to the top of the priority list for more than 80 percent of C-suite executives.

4. IT must become strategic partners

While this may be an oversimplification, IT has a reputation in many organizations as a hindrance rather than an assist in accomplishing business objectives.

Other departments typically see IT as the final barrier to significant change, as they are seen as the gatekeepers to digital transformation. IT professionals focused on process-first rather than people-first methods can effectively veto a promising technology that could make the lives of many employees easier.

This connection must shift as businesses increasingly rely on technology to help them do their jobs. To improve the digital employee experience and boost productivity and creativity, IT will need to form more collaborative partnerships with leadership and other departments.

” It should always be the business leading IT, otherwise it’s like the tail wagging the dog. You’ve got to try and support that, and a technology like Unily is a great platform to support that single-pane of glass use case. We’ve put a lot of work into building an integrations framework that can actually integrate with hundreds, if not thousands, of third-party applications. The vision has to be layering the user experiences on top of the integration so you can provide what anyone in the business needs in just one or two clicks.”Will Saville – CEO at Unily

CIOs must seek to reestablish IT as a valuable business partner, focused on cooperating with the rest of the organization to generate great results for all. Instead of becoming gatekeepers, IT needs to become trusted consultants that help other parts of the company integrate technology that supports their goals and solves their problems.

When IT is considered as a business partner, departments may communicate their long- and short-term strategic goals, as well as risks, costs, and timetables, to technology leaders, who can then offer the capabilities that best meet those goals, including risks, costs, and timelines. As businesses prepare for a decade marked by agility and change, having CIOs and IT leaders advise on digital strategy for the entire organization will guarantee that future expenditures are aligned with business objectives.

5. Total experience starts from the inside

Total experience (TX) is the sum of a company’s experiences, which includes multiexperience (MX), customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), and staff experience (EX). Total experience is a holistic picture of the company in which all of these elements come together.

By using a bottom-up approach to overall experience, the future CIO may significantly boost consumer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Enterprises must focus on innovations that help offer excellent experiences for all stakeholders in the hybrid workplace, where technology is the backbone of practically all employee, customer, and user contact.

Inside-out approaches to entire experience are more likely to give the greatest benefit. Meeting rising consumer expectations necessitates providing staff with the best possible environment in which to work. As a result, CIOs must emphasize a fresh attention on employee demands, as bottom-up enhancements to EX will have an impact on the overall experience of an organization.

As a result, in 2022, employee experience platforms are expected to play a larger role in IT. Where the CIO’s first objective will be to provide employees with meaningful and productive DEX, experience platforms provide a way to connect and empower hybrid workforces while aligning IT priorities to business strategies.

The future of IT is the future of business.
The trends that CIOs and IT will encounter in 2022 are developments that will affect how we all operate in the future. A flexible platform that grows and evolves with businesses is required to align IT goals with business strategy, and cloud-based experience platforms have emerged as the appropriate option.

To explore how an evergreen employee experience platform can assist your digital strategy in a hybrid future of work, contact an expert now.

Source: https://www.unily.com/insights/blogs/top-5-cio-trends-to-know-for-2022