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Strategic Foresight Will Enable CIOs to Reinvent IT

More C-level executives are positioning their enterprise for digital transformation, ahead of their competition. Moreover, the most effective CIOs are already reinventing IT capabilities by deploying new advanced service delivery platforms, while also modernizing their legacy systems.

As traditional IT organizations evolve, IDC has outlined key trends for CIO leadership. According to the IDC assessment, these important predictions provide a strategic context that will enable CIOs to lead their organizations through a period of rapid innovation and disruption over the next five years.

Ten Predictions for CIO Leadership

By 2021, driven by LOB needs, 70 percent of CIOs will deliver agile connectivity via APIs and architectures that interconnect digital solutions from cloud computing vendors, system developers, startups, and others.

Compelled to curtail IT spending, improve enterprise IT agility, and accelerate innovation, 70 percent of CIOs will aggressively apply data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to IT operations, tools, and processes by 2021.

By 2022, 65 percent of enterprises will task CIOs to transform and modernize governance policies to seize the opportunities and confront new risks posed by AI, Machine Learning (ML), and data privacy or ethics.

Through 2022, 75 percent of successful digital strategies will be built by a transformed IT organization, with modernized and rationalized infrastructure, applications, and data architectures.

By 2020, 80 percent of IT executive leadership will be compensated based on business KPIs and metrics that measure IT's effectiveness in driving business performance and growth -- not merely IT operational measures.

By 2020, 60 percent of CIOs will initiate a 'digital trust' framework that goes beyond preventing cyber attacks and enables organizations to resiliently rebound from adverse situations, events, and effects.

By 2022, 75 percent of CIOs who do not shift their organizations to empowered IT product teams to enable digital innovation, disruption, and scale will fail in their roles.

Through 2022, the available talent pool for emerging technologies will be inadequate to fill at least 30 percent of global demand and effective skills development and retention will become differentiating strategies.

By 2021, 65 percent of CIOs will expand agile and DevOps practices into the wider business to achieve the velocity necessary for digital innovation, execution, and change.

By 2023, 70 percent of CIOs who cannot manage the IT governance, strategy, and operations divides between LOB-dominated edge computing, operational technology, and IT will fail professionally.

Outlook for Traditional IT Reinvention

"In a multiplied innovation economy built on emerging technologies, CIOs must reinvent the IT organization to enable their enterprise to take advantage of the most powerful wave of the digital transformation," said Serge Findling, vice president at IDC.

CIOs must also reinvent customer, employee, and partner experiences to strengthen trust and resilience while learning to live with and manage risks posed by AI and ML by reinventing IT governance. Furthermore, they need to reinvent IT leadership, by orchestrating armies of bots and automated processes in addition to leading people.

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