What makes the life of a CIO difficult?

Increasing business complexities, convergence of technologies and forever-rising employee demands - the CIO's challenges are only increasing by the day. "Technology has done wonders. It has remodeled the business and our lives. It's also a double-edge sword, tech failures, and outages have made our lives vulnerable. Tech failure(s) is the fourth biggest risk that the world can encounter today which can bring your business completely down," said Akhilesh Tuteja, Partner, KPMG during his address at the recent DQ Live conference held in Mumbai.

The CIO has to constantly make efforts to align the organization's IT infrastructure with its business goals. Besides there are several other complexities at work that need to be addressed.

Time to react is getting shorter

In the growing competitive environment, CIOs today have core challenge to speed up there manufacturing cycle so that they can pace up with the growing technology demands. Delay in taking decision may lead to huge repercussions.

Aligning IT and Business value

The responsibility of a CIO is not only to make decisions which can help him to achieve business goal but to frame such policies which align IT with business goals.

Employee Demands Rising

In this informative age, Maslow hierarchy theory is loosing its weight age. Earlier, to satisfy employees, CIOs simply followed Maslow theory but now employees demands and their satisfaction ways are becoming more difficult. All because of increasing technology. Employees are making extensive use of technology at home, the awareness among users is much higher and the CIO has to keep up with it. More people believe that they use better technology at home than they have it in office. Now they want highly equipped machine at their workstation. All this have added more burden on CIOs.

Big Data Becomes Bigger Data

It goes without saying that unstructured data growth is increasing day by day which has made tough for CIOs to keep track of the vast trove of unstructured information or big data. The rise of 'big data' analytics has seen CIOs struggling to manage data and operations related to that.

BYOD Adding Worry

BYOD has taken a front seat in most of the organizations, but as this new concept is integrated into the company's infrastructure, IT departments understand how complicated a data center has become. Security concerns related to BYOD have stirred the day-to-day tech workplace.

Think Beyond Revenue

Earlier CIOs investment were more towards those technologies which led to higher rate of return but due to growing competition their focus moved to users demand. 'When you make technology decisions, think it from users perspective rather than revenue perspective,' said Mr Tuteja.

CIOs Role is Expanding

Convergence of IT has converted hopes into realities that we thought were only dreams just a few years ago. It has not only transformed the old age IT roles, but also created several new ones. Earlier, the role of a CIO was to make decisions but now along with that he has to align IT with business values and also focus on user satisfaction.