The Top CIO Challenges, According to 12k+ of Your CIO Peers

Ninety-two percent of CIOs believe AI will be implemented in their organizations by 2025 (more than any other technology), and CIOs face surging expectations from their CEO and board about the business impact of AI.

And yet turning the promise of AI into reality is not a given: 49% of leaders highly involved in AI report that their organizations struggle to estimate and demonstrate the technology’s value. That makes the question not just about how to set AI strategy, but also how to get started with use cases that help determine and realize measurable business value.

Gartner recommends making your AI strategy executable by setting priorities for a portfolio of concrete, business-related AI initiatives, and by putting in place planning goals to build and mature an AI operating model.

Talk to a Gartner Executive Partner. As a client, you can work directly with an EP mentor. Learn more today.

Twenty-seven percent of chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) report that their most pressing challenge is lack of involvement and support from business stakeholders. This presents a conundrum for CIOs, who must often manage the many moving parts of digital platforms becoming ecosystems and the cost of data and analytics — even as D&A use cases expand significantly.

CIOs looking to drive a modern and actionable D&A strategy that delivers business outcomes must establish a tight connection with their CDAO and:

• Align on a vision and scope for D&A to maximize its impact.

• Identify shared challenges, develop affinity collaborations and lean into overlapping innovation aspirations.

• Partner by focusing on business enablement and technology innovation where CDAOs are business leaders and CIOs are technology leaders.

Together these executives must position D&A as a key enterprise asset, and evangelize its impact on critical business goals, processes, decisions and outcomes.

Global cybercrime now costs corporations over $6 trillion annually. CIOs need to ensure the organization can respond to increasingly advanced threats as they emerge as a result of an ever-widening set of global factors. 

CIOs must work with chief information security officers (CISOs) to ensure their organization:

• Ensures clear accountability for cybersecurity risk to enable effective risk-based control decisions.

• Builds a program that reflects the unique business context of the organization, capitalizing on generally accepted standards and proven practices.

• Designs the program for agility and continuous improvement by emphasizing key principles and formalizing security processes.

Eighty-one percent of boards have not made progress toward or achieved their digital business transformation goals. These underwhelming results leave many CIOs struggling to justify technology investments, even as more demands for technology — including artificial intelligence — increase across the business.

In short, many CIOs have greater responsibility for but less direct control over technology spend. CIOs looking to showcase the business value of IT investments must ask:

1. What do my stakeholders value? Value doesn’t lie in the technology itself but in what the technology enables the business to do. 

2. How do I build an IT value story? Differentiate value stories into “run” (keep the lights on) and “change” (improve business outcomes). 

3. How can I effectively communicate value? Use metrics to back up the value story narrative and focus on outcomes, not tasks and processes.