60 percent of CIOs in Asia Pacific will face challenges from line-of-business (LOB) counterparts who can better demonstrate the ability to align technology with the organization’s mission and customers by 2026, according to a IDC report.
CIOs who demonstrate a mix of purpose-driven and people skills now colead with their business counterparts to demonstrate and align technologies to sustainable business outcomes. But, many CIOs now often find their voices drowned out by LOB managers who are heavily involved in making technology decisions.
This truth has put many CIOs at a crossroads in their careers. If CIOs are to play a technology/business orchestration role in the leadership team, part of their effort will involve building or strengthening relationships with business counterparts.
“CIOs are building digital business platforms that can support extensive ecosystems to seamlessly create and deliver products, services, and experiences and to improve on them. In this new world, the role of the CIO has evolved to be one that is a digital business enabler using technology to compete,” says Linus Lai, Chief Analyst and Digital Business Research Lead at IDC A/NZ, in IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2023 Predictions — Asia Pacific (Excluding Japan) Implications.
IDC’s top CIO Agenda predictions
#1: By 2026, 60 percent of CIOs will find their roles being challenged by LOB counterparts who can better demonstrate the ability to align technology with the organization’s mission and customers.
#2: By 2025, 50 percent of CIOs will increase their reach and impact by effectively governing pervasive IT, spanning LOBs and ecosystem partners and optimizing services from the best contributors.
#3: To address the increasing volatility of market and customer needs, by 2026, 50 percent of CIOs will use an operating model design to optimize value stream, agile architecture, and risk management.
#4: By 2024, 40 percent of CIOs will actively harness resilience capabilities as a competitive advantage to deliver financial, supply chain, ecosystem, and sustainability differentiation.
#5: Through 2025, only 30 percent of CIOs will achieve a true intelligent enterprise that blends AI/ML and deep automation, with speed and scale to monetize changing business environments.
#6: To cope with skills shortages, labor needs, and work that is beyond human abilities, by 2026, 50 percent of CIOs will broadly augment critical systems with embedded intelligence and automated technologies.
#7: By 2025, 60 percent of CIOs will rely more on operational data and information collected on the edge as businesses look to act on multiple-source real-time data for faster decision making.
#8: By 2026, 40 percent of CIOs will be tasked with using technology ethically to gain insights into employee experience and their perceptions of the company’s offerings and enable them to amplify the brand.
#9: Through 2027, 80 percent of CIOs will provide governance in selecting clean information technology, holding partners accountable and managing systems with sustainability metrics.
#10: By 2026, with 40 percent or more of IT spending as a service, the use of short-duration Capex cutting tactics will be constrained, instead requiring lasting Opex resets of 10 percent to 30 percent in software and resources.
