How CIOs are getting future-ready for the post-pandemic world

CIOs across the Asia-Pacific region will face a range of conflicting technology challenges in the post-Covid-19 environment, as a desire to drive greater levels of digital transformation conflicts with the need to “do more with less” and shrinking IT budgets.

According to IDC, overall spending on IT will decline by 1.3 per cent in 2020. This decline will not be constant, however, with spending in areas such as IaaS to increase significantly as organisations look to enable work from home and other Cloud-based interactions within the organisation, as well as with customers. Another research from Research and Markets, predicts that Asia-Pacific will lead the way with digital transformation projects, with a CAGR of 20.7 per cent through to 2025.

“Organisations are prioritising the digital customer engagement and ensuring the digital resiliency,” Eric Goh, Vice President & Managing Director, Singapore, Dell Technologies said in a ‘Future-Ready CIO’ discussion, hosted by CIO. “As a result of the digitisation, data is the new currency, and organisations are harnessing insights to create better customer experiences. The future-ready enterprise must focus on prioritising how to extract value from all of this data.”

As Keith Leong, Managing Director, Global Delivery, NCS said, the pandemic has caused acceleration in digitisation, and CIOs need to adopt an enterprise-wide approach to change management that brings people, processes, and technology together for the new ways of working to be successful.

“CIOs need to ensure the ongoing productivity of their staff, together with the security that has to be put in place,” Keith said.

In many cases, achieving this outcome will rely on the organisation’s ability to modernise its working environment. “NCS specialises in helping organisations modernise the applications that allow CIOs to take advantage of cloud technologies as they digitally transform.” he said.

Earlier in the year, organisations were forced into rapid shifts in work styles due to lockdowns. As Goh said, for many organisations, the success of the transformation projects moving forward will be based on the CIO’s ability to step back and become more measured and planned about the next steps. “CIOs need to map key milestones looking at the current state of where they are at on the transformation curve,” Goh said. “It’s about people, processes and values. People need to be reskilled to help drive business success. Having a culture of innovation and learning will be the foundation.”

For more insights on how CIOs can drive future-readiness through their organisation, watch the ‘Future-Ready CIO’ panel, hosted by CIO.