Cover Story: Four IT Trends Defining the Future

Never believe hearsay, especially when it’s about the fading role of the CIO. The truth is that the CIO role has never been more important. Why? Simple. As long as there are new and disruptive technologies, the chief of IT will always be in demand.

And some of these disruptive technologies that’ll have the most profound effect on a CIO’s role this year, according to CIO research, are analytics, cloud, mobile, and sourcing. The investments around these four trends are soaring and pushing businesses to pay attention and take advantage of the changing technology landscape. CIOs have realized that if they have to gain competitive advantage and drive revenue growth for their businesses, they have to latch on to these technologies quickly.

Gone are the days when IT leaders used to spend most of their time keeping the lights on, in fact, CIOs today are collaborating with lines of business and contributing to business strategy, which involves making these four emerging trends a core part of their company’s long-term and short-term business goals. Smart CIOs have already started to do that.

Cloud Platform Helped Hungama Digital Media Lower Its Cost By 50 Percent

And to guide CIOs to find better ways to achieve business goals with new technologies, CIO magazine launched a series of four events—dedicated to analytics, cloud computing, mobility and sourcing–titled CIO Executive Boards. The main focus of this event was to help CIOs learn what their peers were doing to revolutionize business using analytics, cloud, mobility and sourcing. Leading CIOs shared their experiences of how they are leveraging these four technologies in their organizations. Whether it is deploying private and public clouds, exploiting big data using analytics, augmenting traditional outsourcing methods or exploring the wide spectrum of mobile technologies into the organizational fabric, the entire journey has been extremely rewarding for these CIOs.

When Outsourcing Works…or Fails

Their inputs, along with insights from CIOs around the world, form the theme of our cover story. We bring to you tales of CIOs and business leaders who have successfully fostered a culture of innovation by embracing these four trends and how they are contributing to business growth.

Page 1: Outsourcing the Future in 2014

Page 2:  Into the Future with Analytics

Page 3: Dialing the Future with Mobility

Page 4: Future Build Up to the Cloud