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CIOs: Vision 2012

By SiliconIndia   |   Thursday, January 12, 2012
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The year 2011 ended with CIOs juggling between IT innovations and optimization of limited resources, getting to manage harder tasks and helping the organizations wind up remaining projects and start setting objectives and priorities for 2012. Defining goals and objectives for the next 12 months of the year and taking utmost advantage of the inadequate resources within the IT industry in most effective and proficient way continues to be the main challenge for CIOs. As per a survey State of the CIO conducted by the CIO magazine, 2012 would be a challenging year ahead for IT leaders with enterprise security threats a top concern. Strengthening relationships with business stakeholders is on the mind of most of the CIOs but a good number are still falling short in this area with survey results suggesting a wide gap between CIOs perceptions and those of their non-IT peers.

Marc J. Schiller a well renowned author and evangelist to IT leaders quotes Easy To Say, Not Easy To Do where he speaks about how easy it is easy to say that one wants to meaningfully contribute to the business, but its a very different thing and here is the key point is to have the courage to take the first and most difficult step to make it happen.

John Halamaka, CIO at CareGroup Heallthcare System, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School sketched out three priorities for the year 2012 in an article by CIO magazine

Identifying the critical areas of IT ongoing and upcoming projects and defining the process of managing these projects across the enterprise which includes IT intake process, IT Project lifecycle, and project management tools

Business coustomers on the whole add value to the any organization and hence their purpose needs to be served, Identifying these key business customers and ensuring that their priorities are reflected in the current IT operating plan as well as strategic plan

Companies need to standardize communications to have good flow of communication and receive updates on a top-priority projects.

Lets take a look at the some of the key points that CIOs need to check on in 2012

BYOD (Bring you own device): The BYOD trend is been adopted by most of the companies this is because of the union of IT consumerization and enterprise IT, more IT organizations are supporting it to improve productivity of the staff , and execute cost optimization, Though security and governance are being the hindarance, BYOD might be here to stay.

Cloud Computing: Cloud services is on the charts of IT industry and have been emerged as feasible options, the reason undoubtedly being cost savings, flexibility and speed to market they offer, and IT is feeling the pressure to take advantage of them. However the cloud still raises some concerns as security assertions and certifications for cloud providers are still lacking in completeness and availability, nevertheless the model of Cloud Computing will compel businesses to alter their internal IT structures , their relationships and coordination with outsources as well.

Employee Satisfaction: Endless stories have come up about employees that have been left behind to continue operating the same workload with fewer people. Lately there have been reports expecting growth in IT hiring in 2012. As more jobs become available hopefully in 2012, those that have been downsized will make it a point to compete and block these newly opened slots, the risk of losing key people in your organization will be an issue. However as a CIO, you need to make sure your people that are not on the road to burn out by providing them fair compensation and job satisfaction and also helping them remain challenged in a positive way.
Resource Management: 'Do more with less' is the mantra. This mantra indeed sounds good and optimistic, but would certainly bring in new set of challenges for CIOs. As CIOs have to deal with the pressure of converting the saying into doing. The practice would require CIOs to come out of the mould of 'tech heads' and transform themselves into the dynamic role of 'business heads As per article by Gartner. The key point however here is to embrace new methods and innovations to utilize limited resources and have your people make the most out of it. After all, CIOs are the key visionaries of innovation and change that any organization can look upto, they help empower their team to achieve greater efficiency by giving them the right tools to succeed. And nowadays when the selection of these tool sets is quite broad, IT directors can find a solution that will fit their business needs by maximizing the potential of their workforce to build a constructive work culture and achieve growth.

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