If you take a look at the long list of things that a modern CIO is responsible for, securing the company’s network is right there at the top.  

What this actually means is many different things. The importance of  information technology requires that firewalls have to be deployed,  encryption schemes have to be put in place, and end user training that  has to be delivered. However, it turns out that this is all an uphill  battle for CIOs. We are struggling with our end users. It turns out that  they do a really bad job of coming up with passwords to secure their company network assets. 

What’s going on here and just exactly how hard could this be to do correctly?

As the CIO, you have the responsibility to make sure that the company’s  technology is made available to everyone. 

This can be fairly easy to do  when you are considering the needs of your workers. However, things can  start to get a bit trickier when you have to take into account all of  the firm’s customers and the people that you do business with. 

This  issue can come to light when you realize that the company’s website may  not be usable by people who are colorblind.

Although we like to think of the CIO job as being a technology job where we spend our time trying to communicate the importance of information  technology, there is a lot of human contact required. 

With the arrival  of the Covid-19 virus this part of the job, which was never easy, has  all of sudden become that much harder to do. 

In this new era of social  distancing, how can CIOs build the human networks that they need?

CIOs who are responsible for their company’s factories are starting to understand that they will be spending far more on data management and  analytics tools in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, and will  be using those tools for deeper insight into operations, sales and  supply chain disruptions. 

The reason that they will be doing this is  because they understand the importance of information technology and  they want to be able to enhance their ability to remotely monitor plant  equipment, which engineers had limited access to during the pandemic.  All of this is going to require a lot of changes. 

What will CIOs have to do?

The person with the CIO job understands that the future belongs to artificial intelligence (AI).  

Just about every part of the business is starting to be infused with AI  based software that is designed to help humans make better decisions by  wading through the reams of data that threatens to overwhelm most  businesses. 

As much as the person with the CIO job understands that the  importance of information technology requires that mastering AI is  critical to helping the company to get to where it wants to go, they are  starting to discover that hiring people with AI talent is becoming harder and harder to do.

If you’ve been watching TV or reading a newspaper (online) lately, you’ve probably started to see all of the 5G wireless network ads that the major service providers have been running. 

It sure looks  like when 5G arrives, the world is going to change. However, one of the  big questions that CIOs need to find the answer to is just exactly how  is it going to change. 

More specifically, what will the impact be on  workers who want to work from home?

So if you were the CIO for a shopping mall, what would you want to know? 

You’d want to know that all of your servers and networking gear  was secure. You’d want to know what the next “big thing” in technology is going to be. You’d also want to know just exactly who your customers at your mall were.  This last question might be the hardest question of all to answer.  Anyone can go to a mall, visit one or more stores and then go home and  the mall CIO would never know. 

Well, that’s all about change and it’s going to change because mall CIOs are starting to deploy facial recognition software to keep track of you and me.

With a little luck, we’ve all gotten the message by now: having a more diverse IT department makes for a better IT department.  

However, despite the fact that most companies have spent a lot of money  trying to teach everyone about the power of diversity, we still don’t  seem to have done a very good job of making our departments diverse. It  turns out that one of the big problems that the person with the CIO job  is dealing with is that the people doing the interviewing are bringing  their bias to the interview table. We all like people who are like us.  

What can be done about this?

CIOs need to ask themselves why should the business and IT collaborate? 

Perhaps a better question is why wouldn’t they collaborate?  We need to understand that business units like sales, marketing, and  operations have direct interactions with customers that are enabled or  empowered by technology — technology that’s typically managed and  deployed by IT. CIOs have to ensure that these front-line experiences  are optimized for customers. To make this happen business and IT teams  must work together closely. We all know that better customer experiences  lead to better business outcomes. 

Over half of all CIOs are spending  time learning about how better serving customer needs and using the  importance of information technology can create new revenue generation  opportunities.

CIOs need to ask themselves why should the business and IT collaborate? 

Perhaps a better question is why wouldn’t they collaborate?  We need to understand that business units like sales, marketing, and  operations have direct interactions with customers that are enabled or  empowered by technology — technology that’s typically managed and  deployed by IT. CIOs have to ensure that these front-line experiences  are optimized for customers. To make this happen business and IT teams  must work together closely. We all know that better customer experiences  lead to better business outcomes. 

Over half of all CIOs are spending  time learning about how better serving customer needs and using the  importance of information technology can create new revenue generation  opportunities.