Critical recommendations for CIOs and other IT executives, to stay ahead.

The emerging technologies are henceforth essential and indispensable for each organization. The raisons are various and sophisticated: improve productivity and profitability, improve the competitiveness and the security, generate new revenues streams, and streamline critical operations.

Within this momentum, CIOs and other IT executives need inter alia: 

·        A clear plan for strategy and innovation to stay ahead of the business-need curve.

CIOs and other IT executives should be able to identify their current level of capability or maturity, and the gap between where they are and where they should be to maintain competitive balance or achieve industry superiority.

CIOs and other IT executives should be able to appropriate the following as key to IT maturity:

• Leadership: Vision, innovation, ideation, domain and ecosystem awareness, culture
• Planning: Architecture, process and methodology, and roles and structure
• Change Management: Governance, communication and documentation, portfolio management, and metrics
• Financial Management: Business risk and reward, budgetary control, data analysis, and benchmarking

The difficulty in implementing new technologies with constraints imposed by budgets, existing projects or the inability of organizations to change rapidly, is real, but Connectikpeople.co recalls that:

·        Innovation in IT works best when it serves forward-looking business goals, which in turn requires the business to monitor and adapt to its changing ecosystem in an agile and responsive way.

·        Strategy and innovation requires long-term guidance and commitment to building strategic skills in order to stay ahead of the business-need curve.