What's on the CIO's radar for 2020?

It's back to school and that means businesses are planning for 2020 and thinking about what's next and the important tech indicators for their business or organization. Compass Intelligence has kept a close eye throughout 2019 to stay on the pulse on key B2B trends, including tech leader focus areas and what is keeping CIOs up at night.

In a nutshell, here are some highlights:

• Duh, security! (operationally, network, cyber, etc)
• Low Code, No Code (getting it done faster, better)
• From Infrastructure to Cloud
• Data Governance & Policy
• Trusted B2B applications (both workforce and operations)

Securing the Perimeter
Security remains a top concern for CIOs and other tech leaders, as there are ZERO businesses or governments fully secure. The most trusted companies and industries in the world have experienced major breaches over the past year including the likes of Equifax, Capital One, First American Corporation, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, and even the U.S. Postal Service. As we connect more "things" to the network and even sensor systems that may even be connected over WLAN or WiFi open the business or government entity up for vulnerabilities and increased risk for hacking, business disruption, and personal data breaches. The challenges are the various areas of attack and variety of IT and network security, as well as IoT security vendors and products/services, that are available. The challenge for companies and government is many times this priority in investment in security (cyber, network, IoT, systems, etc.) sometimes pushes innovation out the door, as funds are tied up in maintaining and disaster preparedness as opposed to automation and advanced technologies. Preparing and understanding risk is an important first step. 

Minimizing Code
As corporations and big government (across all sizes of business or org) lean more on software and applications, DevOps becomes a critical area of priority. As such, IT leaders and CIOs continue to evaluate and adopt low code and no code solutions to customize, adapt, and integrate back office and client-facing applications. This includes everything from cloud management to logistics management to traditional IT systems management. Businesses are turning to low code solutions in an effort to more quickly act and respond to internal and customer-first issues, and that includes from initial design to full deployment. No code may include simple GUI interfaces for drag and drop, click and add or modify, and other tools to quickly develop...helping IT organizations better serve their companies or organizations. Vendors such as Appian, Salesforce, and Microsoft are just a few companies offering low code to no code developer services.

Managing Data to Benefit the Business
Before we even begin to do BIG things with the data we are collecting and storing, we must first implement a data governance strategy and maintain an overall policy for securing and protecting precious client and proprietary corporate or government data. This means we need to inventory and make decisions on the data we are storing/collecting, understand why it is important, set priorities and align with overall business strategy, and make decisions on insights and intelligence needed for business operations or client/service efficiencies and improvements. We find many companies are collecting and storing data in the cloud but are doing very little with the data. There has to be a real business reason  to manage data whether that be compliance, legal, customer service, operations, logistics, etc. Data governance centers around access, priority and use, intelligence and protection, while policy sets the stage for responsible parties, responsible vendors/applications, priority of service, quality, and overall rules and ways the data will be managed.

To learn more and get access to recent ICT and workforce research, please visit recent research and reports by Compass Intelligence.