‘The IT landscape needs to be flexible to provide advantages to businesses’  

Commitment as a Tech Head  
The CIO’s role is evolving with time. The world has already moved into the new age technology era, with disruptive technologies, automation, digitalisation, variety of business models, etc. getting reinforced into the enterprise and corporate environments. The CIO’s role has already taken the paradigm shift from executing technological aspects to influencing the future direction of their organisations and readying the organisation with digital transformation.
Today’s CIO are taking the critical path of crafting their legacies by finding ways to help drive innovation, growth and enable, influence and lead significant business transformation. They are therefore being considered as the one of the key members in the Board, who can align the business strategy, decisions and goals by interacting with the organisation’s other C-level members to take a digital initiative/direction and offer variety of services and options to customers, resulting in superb Customer experience.

Experience Cell
People skills are today’s one of the challenges for CIO’s. It is important for the organisation to hire the right talent at all times. Based on the organisation’s digitalisation and transformational roadmap, doing a thorough Skill Gap Analysis is the key that helps you know where the organisation actually stands in terms of resources to meet the desired transformational project.

However, as things are evolving, educating, training and mentoring the employees and motivating them with learning newer technologies, associating them with the right project managers to get a complete understanding on business advantages can prompt them to upgrade their skills. Along with upgrading the skills they should also be given a detailed understanding on deep functional business knowledge.

Key Priorities
CIO IT Priorities depends from organisation to organisation and their business models and future directions. Also beyond this, CIOs also need to focus and evaluate the new age technologies like IOT, AI, ML, Analytics, etc to look into the consideration of easing and digitizing the entire business process. In my opinion, some of the below priorities can’t be ignored whatever environment they work in.
•    We all know that the Speed of business continues to accelerate and also senior management team is identifying and exploring the markets faster. This leads to absolute focus on developing and rolling out the solutions faster to keep pace with market and peers. All the activities structuring the IT team to act swiftly and meet targets without any delay.
•    So far we have been talking so much on CX Customer Experience however the challenge our teams still need to adopt the culture of living with it.
•    Identification of the routine, mundane work. Focus and focus on automating what can be automated so that we bring our employees up the value chain and build a smarter employee. If we do not do so, this organisation would not be able to focus on advanced stuff and large chunk of employee’s time would get utilised in routine tasks. If we succeed in this, then accuracy and efficiency of work goes up and your employee can become more productive.

Adaptability to Organizational Changes
The IT landscape needs to be strategically flexible that provides many advantages to businesses. Flexible IT organisations can swiftly align with business needs that are rapidly shifting strategies from one to another. Also, flexibility enables businesses to obtain sustainable competitive advantage by making businesses become more proactive. The key is all this flexibility should come with Zero tolerance on security, compliance and stability. 

Investment Plans for FY 18-19
It sounds good to seek additional budget, however organisations going through such transformations also need to be very cost sensitive since cost pressures are increasing day by day. Most important is how you optimise the existing technology setup by various means, like moving to cloud, consolidation and migrating processes on different technology platforms to bring in uniformity and consolidation. This assists in cost optimisation and also eases out the overall budget needed for the new age technology.