Brave new world: Five key challenges CIOs will face over the next 12 months

Brave new world: Five key challenges CIOs will face over the next 12 months

When the pandemic hit, CIOs had to ensure workforces could work from home. Caroline Sands, Partner and Head of the CIO & Technology Officers Practice at Odgers Berndtson, discusses five challenges CIOs will face as the world emerges into the new normal.

When lockdowns enveloped the world, CIOs found themselves in one of the hotseats. While CEOs and HR leaders were grappling with communications, and CFOs dealt with the unenviable task of forecasting costs in a world that changed daily and CIOs became responsible for ensuring entire workforces could work from bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Depending on pre-existing digital infrastructure, it’s a task that will have been easier for some CIOs than others, but by and large, their efforts have helped prove that working from home ‘works’. However, their problems didn’t end there. With the world emerging into the new normal, there are five other challenges CIOs are likely to face over the next 12 months.

Enable a distributed model of work

The future of work is a distributed model of on-site and remote working. Leadership teams will need to juggle employees that can and want to be in the office with those who don’t and may be unable to be in such an environment. Especially as organisations continue to limit headcounts, workforces will be made up of hybrid digital employees. The responsibility of building new management models for this workforce will fall at the feet of the chief people officer. However, CIOs will need to consider the sort of technology that will maintain team cohesion, ensure visibility so that remote and on-site employees are performance managed equally, and that will enable people to mimic the ‘watercooler’ moments remotely. Even if a vaccine is produced, ‘the genie is out of the bottle’ and many people will want a blended remote and on-site working lifestyle. Organisations will need a technology infrastructure that creates for remote employees the collateral learning that comes from sitting next to someone and the collective engagement that comes from office comradery.

Create digital resilience

Technology leaders did too good of a job when lockdowns forced everyone to work from home. In many cases, it took a matter of days to transition thousands of employees, whole sales teams and customer services into new operating environments. This is an obvious positive but the lasting fallout from this will be an expectation from company boards that technology can provide swift resilience against future crisis. As a result, CIOs will need to help transform their organisations so that they are capable of switching between physical and virtual channels to engage with employees, sell to customers and provide remote services and products. This evolution will depend on sector and size but could include anything from digital education of employees and building a network of IT contractors to flex at need, to increasing the capture of data and regularly modelling crisis scenarios and how the organisation responds to them.

Manage the new impetus for change

Expectations about technology will cause more challenges. Pre-pandemic, a Digital Transformation programme (depending on size and scope), could take months or years to implement, going through lengthy conceptualisation, planning, reviewing and stress-testing processes. When governments enforced lockdowns however, many organisations implemented large-scale Digital Transformation programmes in a matter of weeks. It’s created an impetus for change throughout organisations and particularly at the board level, where board members have become less risk averse to digital technologies as a result of the pandemic, there is now a growing expectation for digital technology to play a greater role in the business. While a positive in some respects, CIOs will need to manage these new expectations and ensure Digital Transformation is aligned to the business strategy and not carried out for the sake of it.

Adopt newly defined leadership traits

Shortly before the pandemic, Odgers Berndtson undertook a global study to investigate the nature of leadership in a world of accelerating disruption. From a survey of 2,000 senior managers and executives at companies of all sizes around the world, we found that only 15% were confident in their leadership teams’ ability to successfully navigate a world of increasing change. Importantly, from those 15% we also identified the specific attributes leaders needed to overcome disruption. When Coronavirus upended every aspect of socioeconomic life, we saw these leadership traits exemplified in those C-suite leaders successfully navigating their organisations through the pandemic. The best demonstrated a desire to communicate consistently and to convey a message of ‘we’re all in this together’. They used compassion, empathy and humility to connect with their teams and displayed genuine authenticity when managing the most distressing aspects of the virus’ impact. What’s more, they were able to make brave decisions at speed, without hesitating and are now either building upon or adapting their organisation’s cultural identity to instil a sense of purpose in the workplace. For CIOs, who are now playing such a central role in the future of their organisations, adopting these traits will be paramount.

Navigate a redefined geopolitical landscape

The post-pandemic world is likely to look very different from the one we knew. There will be new geopolitical constraints that impact supply chains, cloud residency and where talent can be sourced from. Already, many companies have nearshored or onshored aspects of their supply chains, effecting the technology portfolio that underpins these operations. Local lockdowns and new country-specific rules about employment will affect multinational organisations and the digital infrastructure it chooses to deploy, while new data legislation may impact where data can be stored and sourced from. It’s too early to know the exact shape the geopolitical landscape will take, but its change in the wake of the pandemic will pose new challenges for IT infrastructure, data management and IT employment.
The post-pandemic playbook for CIOs is far from being set in stone, however there are a clear set of emerging challenges that CIOs are likely to face. Overcoming these will mean making remote working a long-term success, helping to drive digital resilience throughout the organisation, ensuring Digital Transformation aligns to business recovery and adopting new leadership attributes for the new environment of work. Finally, they should remain adaptable to the fallout of the pandemic – something that will be with us for some time.

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