How Can CIOs Ink A Successful Emerging Tech Strategy?

Every enterprise in order to survive and thrive in the digital economy needs to have a well meshed emerging tech strategy. They need to seamless integrate the new with the old, and in some cases completely overhaul legacy IT. Emerging tech is the key spoke in the digital hub. Let’s see how CIOs can approach a tech like IoT and navigate the complexities.

The emergence of IoT will require CIOs to be a partner in shaping and executing business strategies. With the potential for disruption to existing business models, many organizations will be susceptible to new competition from players in adjacent spaces, including existing partners and from start-ups. The CIO will need to help seed ideas, collaborate in defining an overall IoT strategy and ensure that the organization has access to the necessary capabilities to execute this strategy.

The CIO has to ensure that funded IoT initiatives have a clear business case – in terms of operational efficiency and/or new revenue opportunities. This may include considering how connected products can be monetized and how the value of IoT data can be leveraged.

More than having a long-term roadmap, experts say that it is more beneficial to take an agile approach, which facilitates rapid cycles of experimentation and evaluation. Experts also say that many of the organizations they work with are creating cross-functional and multi-disciplinary groups focused on rapidly developing and evaluating prototype products. The main purpose of CIOs would be on business outcomes. CIOs would be the crucial catalyst for organizations for capturing and to harness the potential of IoT. They should ideally have the following priorities:

• Identify business outcomes and subsequent ROIs

• Evaluate and expand employee skills based on new technology

• Concern about security and data privacy related issues

• Align organizational objectives with skill sets required

Clearly, IoT is the next step in connectivity evolution. It brings people, machines, data, and organizations together in a large ecosystem. CIOs need to play a significant role in enabling IoT in their organization with advanced support, equipment, infrastructure and skill sets. IoT is reshaping enterprise IT, requiring CIOs to be more visionary, more collaborative and more business-minded.

According to experts, IT-OT integration, which means instead of having separate IT (information technology) and OT (operational technology) system, there is an integrated process and information flow, while the CIO and engineering organizations need to define a roadmap for the organizations. IoT is having a significant impact on the OTs and in the way IT operations is monitoring them. CIOs and IT leaders need to adapt skill sets, processes, and tools to monitor IoT availability and performance in order to support business initiatives.

Both CIOs and CXOs are realizing the interplay and potential of IoT, Cloud and Big Data technologies. These topics are increasingly taking centerstage, not as part of the IT strategy, but also the business strategy and business enabling IT, aver experts.