EC News DeskOver the next five years, VMware’s Bask Iyer believes the role of the CIO will transform and leap forward driving by multiple points of inflexion.
5G flips mobile first
5G networks will unleash multi-gigabit connection speeds for mobile phones. This will push enterprises toward thinking mobile first or mobile only. And because most of us use mobile more than other devices, this will create tremendous user satisfaction.
Startups drive use cases
Edge computing will complement data centres and cloud platforms to deliver new customer experiences and enable new applications and use cases. Domain expertise not technology will be the roadblock for IoT and edge applications. In other words, technology is the easy part. How we apply it to an industry or use case takes more work. Hence, expect startups to drive growth in this area.
CIO will drive cash
CIOs will become increasingly more responsible for revenue generation. This has already been happening for the past few years. Over the next five years, this trend will gain momentum.
Employee DX
Digital employee experience will become a huge differentiator to attract and retain talent. This trend is quickly picking up speed. While free food, open offices and pool tables are talked about as differentiators, employees simply want to have the right tools, policies and processes to get their job done. Over the next half-decade, employee digital experience will be treated with same priority as external customers’ experience.
Cross industry collaboration
Blockchain will facilitate transparency and push cross-industry collaboration. Increasingly, this will be a way to fix data integrity issues across multiple corporations—an emerging issue blockchain is solving by enabling trust in transactions in new ways.
Guardians of trust
As businesses become more tech driven, companies are increasingly opening themselves up to cyberattacks and customer data loss. In this landscape, the Office of the CIO will become the new guardians of corporate trust and reputation to build and protect customer relationships.
IT morphs into DX
CIOs and IT organisations will move beyond the IT stack to greatly influence the product design and development function. The IT team in most companies will evolve into the digital organisation. CIOs will become the voice of the customer to educate companies about how their customers would discover, learn, try and buy products and services.
Modernising processes
Enterprises adopt cloud primarily for disaster recovery or to build new apps. Now, they will pivot to leveraging innovations like Kubernetes and multi-cloud solutions to modernise core business applications and processes.
AI leaps and falls
Artificial intelligence will pass the Turing Test, meaning artificial intelligence will match or exceed human intelligence in many areas. However, since many vendors claim they can integrate artificial intelligence into their products and services, we will have to kiss a lot of frogs before finding our prince or princess.
King developer
Developers will move to the centre of the business, enabling modern app-based innovations to drive business transformation. On a related note, IT will drive app-driven digital transformation, and IT job descriptions will match research and engineering such as app development.
