95% of the CIOs expected the nature of their job to change due to digital transformation, according to Gartner’s 2018 CIO Agenda survey.
Gartner surveyed 3160 CIOs across 98 countries, covering 15 main industries, and found that digital is the top priority for all the industries.
- Role of CIOs is changing
The survey revealed that the digitalization and innovation would impact the job of CIOs across all industries. It means that they would have to accelerate and converge technology trends, shift business expectations, and form new objectives for organization.
Majority of CIOs said that the details of the new job were not clear, and they didn’t have any blueprint to follow. It’s a big challenge for them.
73% of the CIOs said that their organizations were adaptable and open-to-change. Gartner suggested that now is the right time for CIOs to transition to their new role and develop the crucial characteristics they would need to master going forward.
- Digital transformation among top three priorities for majority of CIOs
CIOs from 11 of the 15 industries said that digital transformation was among their top three business priorities for 2018. This indicated a rise in digital urgency across the industries.
Specifically, the CIOs from banking and investment services (26%), telecom (25%), and government (18%) organizations ranked digital transformation as their number one business priority in 2018.
- Modern technologies difficult to implement
Artificial intelligence (AI), digital security, and internet of things (IoT) were the most difficult technologies to implement, according to the CIOs who implemented these technologies.
CIOs cited finding out the new skills to exploit these technologies as the most common pain point for the organizations.
- Struggling to move digital transformation initiatives from experimentation to scale
According to Gartner, a majority of CIOs across most of the industries were struggling to move the digital business initiatives from experimental phase to scale. 54% of the organizations were still in the designing or delivering stages.
Only 17% of the organizations overcame the challenges and were either scaling (14%) or harvesting (3%) the digital transformation initiatives.
Also read: CEOs shifting their focus to digital business to accelerate growth: Gartner CEO survey
“Looking at both stages combined, the media (33%) and telecom (29%) industries were in the top spots in terms of scaling the reach and impact of their digital business initiatives, letting them mature, and allowing the business to harvest the benefits they were creating,” said Jan-Martin Lowendahl, research vice president at Gartner.
Images source: Gartner