Posted by Mumbai: CIOs and IT leaders’ new year resolutions in 2020? This is a key question today because the IT industry is already under a major transformation.
Certainly, the technology driven transformation, whether it be in the business, professional or personal side has come a long way.
CIOs and IT leaders need a close look on their focus areas, interlinked with daily work and life activities. So ideally.
What should be CIOs and IT leaders’ new year resolutions look like in the year 2020?
While, there may be a long list of resolutions, that one can come up with, but.
Data Policy, Building Business Cases and Human Intelligence are the three key resolutions that CIOs and IT leaders should consider. They should make a note of it and try to follow them.
1) Draft Data Policy
When it comes to digital and technology, ‘data’ is one of the biggest drivers of the digital age. Whether it be the internet or any business application – it requires some form of data. So every CIO and IT leader need to draft a clear, well-defined stringent data policy in their respective organization.
This data policy will help restricting different departments and staff in the organization from the data misuse or unauthorized access.
The data policy should not only adhere to industry specific regulations or local government but also to regional jurisdiction. For example, European Union’s GDPR law for protecting data of its citizens. (General Data Protection Regulation was implemented in 2018 May by the European Union)
Brazil, Japan, Thailand, Australia, South Korea and the US are the six nations, besides the EU, which have their own data privacy laws.
The US doesn’t have a GDPR like data laws as of now. However, California state has a state specific data law introduced late in 2019 called the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
There should be a monitoring, access and auditing process or mechanism as part of this policy. This is help to deal with the data storage and its legal usage within the organization. And it can play a bigger role in addressing the situations such as data thefts, data breaches and cyberattacks.
One of the key aspect of data policy is education and awareness in the organization. CIOs and IT leaders need to focus on data literacy and awareness for all the staff across departments.
2) Data driven Business Cases
When it comes to technology procurement and implementation or even the annual IT refreshment. Most CIOs and IT leaders have a hard time dealing with their respective boards, particularly the finance departments and CFOs.
Most CIOs and IT leaders usually address this situation by making business cases and presenting it to their boards. Business cases in most organizations are slide based presentations with some details and summary, pointing to investment, benefits, cost reductions, impact and risks and so forth.
Boards are very strict when it comes to business cases. Many are rejected because of some unrealistic estimates and assumptions. They lack strong evidence or facts based data to prove their objectives.
CIOs and IT leaders need to build every business case by leveraging internal data. They should use simple statistical methods and analytics to create a real scenario backed numbers and facts.
CIOs and IT leaders should engage, interact and involve more with the respective departments and staff. It will help to collect feedback and experiences based information that can derive data and insights as well.
They should spend more time on conducting trials and pilots internally. This helps to create a real scenario, enable them to generating any department or organization specific data and not any generic information.
These collected data sets from different source points can play a key role in building valid business cases. The idea is to create and gather own data sets drive more accurate decisions rather than rely on external data.
3) Rely on Human Intelligence
In the digital age, businesses and organizations are increasingly dependent on technology and technological processes. Already, there’s a growing trend to deploy technology built or cognitive form such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and others.
For CIOs and IT leaders, it is inevitable to leverage such technology based intelligence for business processes and functions. But they shouldn’t overlook the human intelligence of the workforce in their organizations.
CIOs and IT leaders should gauge their workforce in terms of skills, understanding and problem solving abilities. They should leverage and complement it with cognitive technologies. So not only it increases overall efficiency and productivity but also the quality.
These are the three key resolutions that most CIOs and IT leaders should focus and follows. Not just as new year resolutions, but make them as part of business and IT strategy.