The 5 challenges CIOs are facing today and how to tackle them

The people responsible for IT systems in Spanish organisations are playing an increasingly strategic role in their future. They are the ones making decisions in terms of cybersecurity and technological investments depend, which today are key indicators of their success in the market. For this reason, expectations about their role are also growing exponentially, and so are the challenges they face. However, as revealed in a survey conducted by Conasa, 42% of Spanish CIOs claim that they do not have the right tools for decision-making.

Spanish companies must be more aware than ever of the need for and importance of being aware of these challenges in order to be able to address them. This is the way, knowmad mood, a leading technology consultancy in digital transformation solutions, explains what these challenges are and how companies can help to overcome them.

The profound transformation of IT’s competitive priorities

There is no doubt that, in the last four years, the world and the business environment have undergone a drastic transformation that has brought a market that is still volatile today. In this context, companies, and also CIOs, are forced to be much more agile and flexible in order to continue to provide the business with the tools it needs to grow. Then, it becomes imperative to move towards new IT models that give developers this necessary agility and allow them to pivot to new solutions as the market itself changes. A great example of this is that nearly two out of three CIOs plan to invest in process automation to achieve this goal, according to a recent study by Eraneos.

Cybersecurity, a growing and increasingly sophisticated risk

According to a study by Logicalis, 83% of CIOs say they have suffered a cyber-attack in the last year. The evolution of technology, as well as the emergence of new technologies such as machine learning or AI, have brought with them not only an increase in cyberattacks, but also in their sophistication. For this reason, cyber security remains, and increasingly so, a constant challenge for every company and for CIOs, who need a development and application environment that maintains a strong focus on cyber security. All this to be able to anticipate the plans of cybercriminals.

Keeping up to date with developments in AI and Machine Learning

According to a Canva survey, 96% of CIOs in Spain will increase their budget for AI tools this year. And these technologies are becoming more and more widespread among CIOs, yet their rapid advancement forces CIOs to constantly update their development. Therefore, the big challenge is to find or train developers and data scientists who are not only able to deliver applications in an agile and efficient way, but also help the business grow. Therefore, they need to accelerate these processes and facilitate the incorporation of these technologies into applications, thus ensuring that business needs are met.

Deliver incredible customer experiences on tight budgets

The speed of meeting customer demands is a growing pressure on CIOs if they must also adjust to budget constraints. For this reason, CIOs need platforms that allow them to build bespoke customer experiences with the resources they have at the time and at a greater agility and efficiency than traditional development without compromising quality, security, or scalability. In fact, according to another Logicalis study, 85% of CIOs with dedicated AI budgets will use it to improve customer experience and save costs.

Maximizing the value of digital transformation

During the pandemic, digital transformation initiatives were accelerated in such a way that, in many cases, the result was application mazes, weak connections and, especially, information silos. This is counterproductive because, as Ivanti’s latest report points out, 63% of IT teams feel that their response times are slowed by these data silos. However, the truth is that companies and CIOs can still make the most of all this seemingly lost information, with tools that quickly bring all this data back to life and integrate the different systems, allowing companies to move from a weak digital transformation to a much more structured and effective one.

“It is a fact that, with the advance of digital transformation and the progressive incorporation of new technologies, CIOs are becoming more and more strategically important in companies. Therefore, and in order to grow the business, it is essential that companies are able to support these professionals in addressing the challenges they face, of course, always hand in hand with a true partner with great experience as knowmad mood”, says Pedro Gallardo, Business Development Director at knowmad mood.