There is no alternative to digitisation

Guest post by Mark Cockerill a vice-president at ServiceNow based in Dublin.

How IT bosses can master the balancing act between cost reduction in the recession and simultaneous innovation.

As with any period of great disruption, there have been winners and losers in this crisis.  While video conferencing platforms, like Zoom, have flourished, others such as the aviation industry, hospitality and cruise industries, have been brought to their knees. For most, though, the extent of the crisis is somewhere between these two poles. Crucially, Covid-19 has dramatically accelerated the transformation of almost all businesses. Anyone who was already well positioned in terms of digitisation had an immense advantage here.

For the CIO, during and beyond the pandemic, this means finding the right balance between necessary cost-saving measures and continued investment in digitisation is a must. Because future success lies even more in the growth of digital services, they are looking for effective solutions with which they can increase the productivity of the company and their IT, and thereby reduce operating costs.

No alternative to digitisation

The way employees and thus companies work has changed fundamentally, and we have long been living in the future that many people advocate. In this respect, there was no alternative to digitisation, even before Covid-19. The pandemic has only forced companies to focus more on it in order to ensure business continuity. Put simply, all roads ultimately lead to transformation.

Regardless of the route you take, such transformation is always about speed, efficiency and stability in digital processes. Against this background, four decisive changes have been observed in the past 18 months.

First, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have long ceased to be topics that only elitist science deals with. These technologies have now arrived in companies and thus in real business.

Second, we are no longer just talking about digitisation. All future-thinking companies have now implemented a concrete implementation roadmap with ambitious goals and schedules.

Third: Almost every company has now created new digital services – including traditional providers from the manufacturing and automotive industries, where the focus is no longer solely on the product as hardware, but on digital product-related services.

And fourth: Anyone who wants to develop digital services needs the appropriate skills. So soliciting talented software engineers has become a new core competency of companies.

The future role of the CIO

Over the coming months and years, we can only expect the CIO to become even more integral to the success of their organisation. Their ability to unite the new and old technology worlds, managing both day-to-day operations along with long-term strategic tasks, will be critical.

Automation is the basic requirement for efficient IT operations. Speed ??and agility are becoming more and more decisive competitive factors. So those who provide their IT services in a stable, scalable, secure and low-cost way have laid a solid foundation. There is potential for savings of more than 60 per cent in the automation of processes alone. And, of course, in this context, we are also talking about sustainable improvement in employee and customer satisfaction through efficient processes and a smart user interface.

In striving for this, a growing number of CIOs are guided by a platform approach and less by a product-centric approach. Our “Now” platform, therefore, enables both the integration of new digital workflows into the respective hybrid cloud infrastructure and the adaptation to individual standard software programs – for example in the HR or finance area. So, it’s about building new applications for the benefit of more productivity and better customer and employee satisfaction.

Beyond daily operations, the CIO will need to slip further into the role of a technological thought leader. This position carries a broad remit, among other things, Chief Sales Officer responsible for promoting the transformation. Because they must be able to sell the vision of a “better tomorrow” to their company so that it can become even more successful with the help of new technologies. From a chief human resources officer’s perspective, the CIO should drive the ever-learning company. Technologies such as machine learning algorithms or modern collaboration platforms are required here, without which quick and well-founded decisions are not possible. And last, but not least, as Chief Transformation Officer, the CIO should bundle all these activities.

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