In an ever changing world, nothing has a faster pace than IT, and the person in the lead of this change is the CIO. The challenges of the evolving CIO role was one of the many topics that were discussed at CIO Trend 2016, hosted by IDG Sweden, where about 80 CIOs, IT-managers and Heads of IT gathered for knowledge exchange and networking. The agenda featured several industry experts and a Startup Panel, where Detectify was one of three invited startups to hold a 5 minute pitch for the audience.
These are three of the conclusions I brought back home with me.
Long term plans and short term actions
One of the recurring topics of the day was how to manage teams during today’s transformation. A lot of us are used to working with roadmaps and product visions, but the demand for moving to a more fast paced and agile environment is only getting higher and higher. Johan Hallberg, a researcher at IDC, referred to this as “Managing teams in 3D”.
Analysts claim that 9 out of 10 companies that are rated top 1 within their respective fields today will be replaced by companies established after 2000. One of the key ways to not be surpassed by new startups is to manage to navigate in the mist, and find a way to make decisions that follow both your long term and your short term agenda.
Automation
Everything that can be automated will be automated, and we are already seeing the effects in the IT sector: smaller manual hosting companies are being pushed aside by automated services like AWS and Azure. Developer teams are taking over ops-responsibilities where Devops and Noops are being implemented. More and more services are being automated and only act and inform on demand.
But automation is not only coming to IT. So-called Lights out factories, where robots are in charge of the entire production chain, are becoming incessantly popular. Fully automated factories that can receive an order, reprogram themselves and automatically start the production are here to stay.
Security is an all growing priority
It doesn’t matter if we look at what’s trending, what the biggest challenge is or what the CIOs’ plan is to invest in; security will be in the top 3. The need for a holistic view covering IT-security has grown with more than 25% since last year according to the latest CIO report from IDG Sweden.
Within today’s IT infrastructure, when more and more data is being migrated to the cloud, the demand to know who has access to what data is an ongoing struggle. Services like Identity as a service (IDaaS) are being accepted.
I know I said three, but to wrap it up I am going to give you a fourth – it’s no longer technology but rather the services that drive which solutions to choose whether it comes to planning, automation or security.
Author:
Johan Norrman, CIO, Detectify
Twitter: @johannorrman