C-suite 2022 strategy: digital budget & use cases
The pandemic has proven what is possible to achieve through C-level alignment, focus on specific activities, quick decision-making, and budget allocation. Now the hard part is to sort out the strategy.
In the last 18 months, the focus has been violently shifted to CIOs. It is fair to say that they have been under lots of pressure lately. Accountable for solving the emergency at the beginning of the pandemic, and then, strategising how IT can self-serve current, and future business models.
Not only CIO responsibilities have been shifted to a strategic role, not quite familiar to many CIOs, but also extended their technical duties to digital, HR, finance, and procurement. In addition to the burdensome regular ones: innovation, grasping a variety of complex new technologies, integration, capabilities orchestration, and change management from project to product; just to name a few under the digital business transformation domain.
Although the IT function as Business Partner has influenced the budget more than ever before, the ownership remains dependent on a variety of factors: priorities, use cases, and hierarchical dynamics within each organization.
If priorities are still CFO, and COO’s ownership, and usually set up around cutting operational costs, cash flow-based initiatives, long term investments in new technologies, different C-suites manage different centres of cost.
As a continuation of funded initiatives started in 2020 and 2021, in 2022, budget allocation will be in constant growth and remain within the subscription-based software world: SaaS, hyperscalers, analytics, and a variety of automation platforms. The macro areas of focus will be around: customer experience, cloud transformation in its different stages, cyber security, automation platforms, and digital workspace. With a transversal eye on sustainability within each initiative.
Technology vendors, based on their products, services, and use cases leveraged, will interact with different personas CIO, CDO, CTO, CX, CMO, CRO, CISO, CFO, CHRO.
USE CASES
1- Customer experience improvement use cases. Customer experience improvement use cases will see Sales leaders, CDO, CMO, CX, CRO and CIO (on the technology side) working together to get a better knowledge of their customers.
Almost every organization suffer, or has suffered, a lack of data centralization (visibility, governance, compliance, security..), misalignment between functions (not only business and IT, but also within the business itself), lead time to production and time to market too long to be effective and to produce significant business outcomes.
In an unpredictable market, there is the need to understand better customers, serve them better, improve operational efficiencies, increase the number of leads, sales, growth in new markets and experiment with new business models.
Adopting platforms from where getting a unique source of data allows the organization to understand, and cross-functionally share, what matters and what doesn’t, to which customer segment. See my article How to rewire the organizations around customers
2- Cloud transformation use cases. Cloud transformation has been the biggest technology spending in 2020. From migration, DevOps, through app modernization, CIO, CTO, CDO will continue to move forward with those initiatives toward 2022.
Cloud transformations frequently start bottom-up from the infrastructure. Over time you need to do both, getting out from the data centre to reduce CAPEX costs, delivering faster, and increasing security and compliance, modernizing applications. The latter are the ones impacting business, changing customer experience, and building digital capabilities. See my article about Business is speed through Application modernization.
The first wave of cloud transformation has seen the migration from data centres to private and public clouds. Now is the time to identify a strategy, integrate and orchestrate hybrid cloud environments, learn how to acquire speed, and fast-tracking the path to production with DevOps and Cloud-native applications. See my article 5 steps from Strategy to Roadmap in weeks rather than months or years.
3- Cyber security use cases. Cyber Security not always has a specific C-suite function assigned, like CSO. Based on the size of the enterprise the responsibility is also split between CIO, CTO and IT leaders. Security and privacy use cases range from enforcing networks to establishing policies and best practices in a hybrid workforce, to DevSecOps: developing and deploying software with security and privacy by design.
4- Analytics and Automation, in its broader terms, from enterprise to industrial digital-first initiatives, automate specific tasks and a variety of use cases cross-industry. IoT digital tweens, RPA (robotic process automation), LCAP, AI, ERP, CRM. Covid has highlighted organization’s weaknesses. One of them is automation gaps. Automation not only brings efficiencies, but also visibility, remote management, monitoring, and the ability to trace, plan, and forecast.
5- Digital Workspace use cases won’t disappear since the pandemic is still creating instabilities in many countries. CEO, CIO, CTO, CHRO, will keep improving or overlooking security and costs in a more responsible way due to the stabilization of a hybrid way of working. It is about the integrations between different devices, virtualization, automated workflow, and the fruition of the right data at the right time in a secure and privacy-preserving way. Digital workspace is not only tools and security, but also policies to organize the work across the organization when meeting in presence or remotely.
