Skills shortage on horizon as enterprises transition to SMAC: SOTC 2017

A transforming business landscape characterized by digital disruption has led to a change in CIO priorities. In order to map CIO priorities and new technology adoption, we conducted our annual State of the CIO (SOTC) survey, which covered 236 CIOs of large, and midsized enterprises. The survey provides insights into IT challenges and technology adoption trends among Indian enterprises in 2017.  Adoption of social media and collaboration tools is still in a nascent stage among the enterprises. In 2017, 17.4 percent of our respondents said they wanted to invest in social media and collaboration tools. However, mobility is fast catching up among enterprises. 35.5 percent said they were looking to invest in mobile application development.  With enterprises embracing cloud, mobility, social technologies and analytics there seems to be a scarcity for skilled manpower. 48 percent of the respondents expect shortage of skillsets over the next 12 months. About 41 percent feel that they will face a challenge finding suitable candidates in the domain of big data or data science. At the same time, more than a third of the respondents feel that they will see a skills shortage in mobile application development. More than half of the CIOs (52 percent) plan to improve customer experience in 2017.  A quarter of the CIOs see a significant increase in face time with customers. To understand the business challenges we also gauged CEO priorities. 39 percent of CEOs want to lead product innovation effort, 36 percent want to simplify IT and 32.2 percent want their CIOs to upgrade IT and ensure data security to avoid cyber-attack. As per the survey, 55 percent of the CIOs feel that IT security strategy is an integral part of overall IT strategy and roadmaps. A jump of 30 percent over the last year shows that security is one of the top concerns for CIOs.