2021: Top Challenges faced by modern-day CIOs

Emerging technologies have always been at the center of trends right from mobile-first consumer shopping preferences to the promise of artificial intelligence in critical decision-making that have reshaped the current competitive landscape and disrupted business models. For this reason, companies need to be tech-forward to drive the business.

Nowadays, CIOs are focusing on business outcomes, agility, and improving customer experience through technology. While at the same, streamlining backend operations with automation is becoming one of the primary focus areas of technology leaders. Despite this pressing need for digitization in the organization, around 79% of them are still in the early stages of technology transformation, according to Mckinsey. It is due to critical issues related to legacy system barriers such as integration, security, etc., in today’s landscape. So, there is a need to create an environment to provide holistic accessibility to emerging technologies.

The top challenges faced by CIOs in 2021 are as follows:

1. Digital Transformation has been evolving slowly. 45% of executives don’t think their company has the right technology to implement a digital transformation. But COVID-19 has forced many organizations to re-examine the pace of their digital transformation initiatives. 35% of companies view digital technology as disruptive to their business model.
2. As data becomes more distributed, integrating a large volume of data from different sources in disparate formats on the legacy system is a roadblock. While 97% of organizations planning to undertake digital transformation initiatives, integration challenges hinder efforts for 84% of organizations. So, the CIOs priority in 2021 is how to extract powerful insights by removing the barriers around the data and make data accessible.
3. Over the last few years, there has been a massive growth and adoption of new technologies such as AI/ML, data science, etc, across the businesses. As a result, there is a shortage of required skillsets in an organization. According to Forrester, while 75% of businesses have a digital strategy, only 16% claim to have the skills to deliver it.
4. The inability of legacy systems to keep up with the business demands because of exorable growth in data and the inability to manage multiple data formats across legacy storage platforms. So, CIOs must make a considered choice for modern data platforms that allows integrating multiple datasets from a variety of sources and create a single view of the data.
5. Manual processes and workflows are no longer feasible for many organizations. Automation initiatives that used to put on the back burner are now quickly spun up. CIOs need to start thinking of automation as a liberator of their people rather than as an executioner freeing employee from repetitive tasks to focus on higher productive tasks.
6. As CIOs are constantly addressing new and developing business challenges, there is a need to adopt emerging technologies such as AI/ML and IoT to compete and stay ahead of the evolutionary curve. As we enter 2021, we must look beyond the latest trends and develop a mindset that enables them to identify a problem that is looking for an answer.
7. Fostering innovation is one of the priorities of CIOs today. But keeping up with the business demand with existing resources has become a challenge. For CIOs to keep up with business demands, new technologies and processes need to be implemented. Innovation can’t happen if there is a massive backlog of business requests in an organization.

Let us look at some of the thought-provoking statistics to understand why there is an exigency to address these challenges.

Challenges in 2021: Seven Roadblocks, One Answer

The answer to the aforementioned challenges is Augmented Analytics. It democratizes AI across the data value chain. It automates the data preparation process, aspects of data science and narrates relevant insights using NLP and conversational analytics. It enables fewer technical experts such as citizen data scientists with low/no-code abilities to interact with the data to give recommendations for decision-making. This increases efficiency and productivity.

Below are the five reasons how Augmented Analytics helps in addressing the aforementioned challenges.

So, how is your organization approaching these challenges? Do you think Augmented Analytics addresses all these challenges? If yes, let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Payal Paranjape

Payal is a Product Marketing Specialist at Subex, who covers Artificial Intelligence and its application around Generative AI. In her current role, she focuses on Telecom challenges with AI and its potential solutions to these challenges. She is a postgraduate in management from Symbiosis Institute of Digital and Telecom Management, with analytics as her majors, and has prior engineering experience in the Telecom industry. She enjoys reading and authoring content at the intersection of analytics and technology.