CIO In The Know – Starting 2024 with a new focus on technology

Happy New Year!

Kicking off the first of this year’s CIO In The Know newsletters talking about The CIO Playbook for 2024. Bottom line: The CIO’s remit is huge! And complicated. Simplification is the key word here.

Any conversation in 2023 had to include generative AI to be taken seriously. Approaching the end of 2023, the feverish pitch of generative AI started to cool ever so slightly. That, combined with a sort of fatigue around generative AI, is a good thing as the topic was getting incredibly frothy. This slight cooling makes way for a more foundational and important conversation about where generative AI, and the broader use of AI, fits in…and doesn’t.

It also provides a chance to educate teams on what generative AI is, isn’t and how best to use it. One of the recent posts on the blog talks about how ChatGPT is being used for confidential and regulated information. It is a good example of why better education is needed across the organization.

CIO Water Cooler Talk

I spent the last few months of 2023 listening, learning, and collaborating with fellow CIOs. There is a lot on the mind of CIOs that gives them both excitement and concern. My focus was on the ‘the big three’ (CX, EX and business operations/ supply chain). I mentioned the big three in the last CIO In The Know newsletter and detailed it a bit further in the CIO Playbook for 2024. Each of these expand into a myriad of different directions further adding to the complexity. Here’s a quick take on each of the big three and how CIOs are approaching them.

Customer experience is going to be front and center for CIOs more than ever before. From CDPs to data repositories to governance to customer engagement platforms, technology is changing the game for the customer experience.

Employee experience plays a key role within IT and beyond. New technologies, methodologies and platforms are considering the whole self. Directly addressing employee experience has a direct impact to customer experience. New technology options provide individualization to consider more of the human needs and components. To complicate things, in 2024, there is more concern than ever among CIOs around the return to office edicts that are growing and the impact they will have.

Business operations and supply chain are getting more complicated. One discussion topic among CIOs and frankly the rest of the ELT has been around globalization. Is it dead? There are different schools of thought. The pandemic gave enterprises a moment of pause in considering their choices around how to best build their supply chains. New platforms make it easier than ever to build more sophisticated processes and options.

For IT specifically, CIOs are considering their business’ supply chain. They are also considering their own people and technology supply chains too. 

Cybersecurity is making a resurgence in the CIO conversations. While the Solarwinds breach happened some time back, the more recent Okta breach and entrance of generative AI are reopening the conversation about how best to engage and rethink how to approach cybersecurity.

In addition, the topic of cybersecurity and ransomware is evolving to a broader, upleveled conversation around risk management. This is a good thing as there are other IT-specific risks that can overshadow cybersecurity and ransomware risks, but historically were not popular topics.

New content

The topic of cloud computing is popular in the last quarter of the year as several vendors including Amazon Web Services hold their annual conferences. Here’s what is new on the blog.

Blog

• Jan 5: The CIO Playbook for 2024
• Dec 20: IBM’s Strategic Acquisition of StreamSets and webMethods: A CIO Perspective
• Dec 12: Amazon re:Invent Recap – Cloud, AI, Data and more
• Oct 24: ChatGPT being used for confidential and regulated information

What’s your take?

This is just a snapshot and there is a lot to unpack here. Looks for more unpacking in future missives.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear from you and your perspective.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cio-know-starting-2024-new-focus-technology-tim-crawford-nuz9c