Recent advances have highlighted AI's incomparable potential and not yet fully fathomed risks, placing CIOs in the hot seat for figuring out how best to leverage this increasingly controversial technology in business. Here's what they have to say about it.
With the AI hype cycle and subsequent backlash both in full swing, IT leaders find themselves at a tenuous inflection point regarding use of artificial intelligence in the enterprise.
Following stern warnings from Elon Musk and revered AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who recently left Google and is broadcasting AI's risks and a call to pause, IT leaders are reaching out to institutions, consulting firms, and attorneys across the globe to get advice on the path forward.
Strategic cloud investments amplify the impact of other technologies on how investors value companies, the consulting firm found.
Strategic investments in cloud migration, cloud-native projects and related cyber and machine learning services deliver outsized impact on market valuation and shareholder returns, according to a Deloitte report published Tuesday. The consulting firm analyzed the financial statements and technology spending of more than 4,500 companies over a 10-year period.
Spending on cloud acts as a force multiplier, the report found, adding long-term value to investments in automation, cyber, IoT and other individual technologies. Cloud investments yielded roughly three-times the market value compared to cyber investments alone, the analysis found.
As organisations place greater emphasis on supply chain management, Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) intend to grasp their collective opportunity to invest in growth through new technology investments.
In a survey of 499 supply chain leaders from October through December 2022, 65% of respondents said they anticipate it will be easier to fund new technology investments with 73% of supply chain IT budgets this year to be allocated to growth and performance enhancements, on average.
'The last three years of uncertainty have blurred the line between business and technology strategies to the point that they must be considered together,' said Simon Jacobson, VP analyst in Gartner's Supply Chain Practice.
The study, The Decision Dilemma, by Oracle and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of Everybody Lies and Don't Trust Your Gut, reveals that people feel overwhelmed and underqualified to use data to make decisions and this is hurting their quality of life and business performance.
The study of more than 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries, including 4,500 respondents from Asia Pacific and Japan (JAPAC), found that people are struggling to make decisions in their personal and professional lives at a time when they are being forced to make more decisions than ever before.
Overwhelmed by data and amount of decisions to make
The study noted that people in JAPAC are overwhelmed by the amount of data and this is damaging trust, making decisions much more complicated, and negatively impacting their quality of life.
We should save the word transformation for when we fundamentally change how things work. Otherwise, everything is transformational -- even the new coffee machine in the kitchen. Here's the basis of my reasoning: Words have meaning.
Or they should have. Suppose I said, 'Let's transform our workforce?' Would you think I meant that everyone gets a raise? Or am I talking about retrenchments and restructuring? The latter would be the guess of most employees. If I said, 'Let's upgrade our workforce,' it would have a different meaning for employees. And if I said, 'We want to upgrade our customer support system,' it would be different to transforming the system.
The term 'digital transformation' can be defined broadly, encompassing many ideas and largely tied to an organization's specific goals. For example, a digital transformation might entail a business switching from paper forms to a cloud-based system for better recordkeeping, or developing an application to improve customer engagement options.
Typically, pursuing a digital transformation means prioritizing tools that enhance a company's operations, profits, growth potential and more. Here are five examples of what a digital transformation could look like for a modern business to use as inspiration for progress at your own organization.
1. Digital Transformation Creates Strategic Advantage For A Healthcare System
2. A Data-Centric Plan Helps A Multinational Food And Beverage Brand Excel
3. Digital Supply Chain Planning Improves Pandemic Coping
4. Electronics Brand Aims For An Omnichannel Approach
5. Cloud Computing Helps The University Of Bristol Reach More Students
CIOs are scrutinizing IT budgets closely as economic volatility increases. While application modernization is cited by 87 percent of IT, security, and executive leaders as critical to digital transformation success, 42 percent are experiencing budget constraints to fund such initiatives.
However, if organizations wait to modernize, problems will grow exponentially. An independent survey commissioned by EvolveWare found that 51 percent of organizations already have faced or anticipate critical issues with systems that have not been modernized. It's a situation that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Southwest Airlines experienced not too long ago.
The FAA's legacy air traffic safety system failed on January 11, 2023, because of a corrupt file, bringing down both primary and backup systems. This error resulted in the cancellation of 9,000 flights that day. Similarly, Southwest Airlines' legacy point-to-point system that planned the placement of resources for its flights could not keep pace in re-assigning planes and staff to routes that were facing delays and cancellations due to bad weather.
Asked about the Board and C-Suite's understanding of cybersecurity across the organisation, only 39% of respondents think their company's leadership has a sound understanding of cybersecurity's role as a business enabler, according to Delinea.
36% believe that it is considered important only in terms of compliance and regulatory demands, while 17% said it is not seen as a business priority.
The disconnect between business and security goals appears to have caused at least one negative consequence to 89% of respondents' organisations, with 26% also reporting it resulted in an increased number of successful cyberattacks at their company.
The impact of misaligned goals on cybersecurity was wide-ranging as it contributed to delays in investments (35%), delays in strategic decision making (34%), and unnecessary increases in spending (27%).
In 2015, Gartner defined the role of the chief data officer (CDO) as 'a senior executive who bears responsibility for information protection and privacy, governance, data quality and life cycle management, along with exploiting data assets to create business value.' That is quite the list, but one that I'm sure any early CDO would likely recall and agree with.
Over the last eight years, the CDO has earned greater credibility across organizations and become a valued partner in the delivery of competitive business outcomes. The broad scope hasn't changed, but the CDO now has greater power to influence strategy and prioritize activities.
Below I'll outline the factors pushing this evolution and what the CDO's blueprint looks like moving forward.
Proofpoint's 2023 Voice of the CISO report shows deep concern among executives about impending data loss and exposure from negligent -- and malicious -- employees.
You can listen to this article. This audio was generated by AI.
According to a new survey, some CISOs feel the growing pressures and expectations around data protection in the post-pandemic threat landscape are becoming insurmountable.
Proofpoint's 2023 Voice of the CISO report revealed growing doubt among CISOs in their ability to successfully protect their organizations from data exposure and theft. According to the survey, which featured 1,600 respondents from around the world, 61% of CISOs felt their organizations are unprepared to cope with a targeted attack, up from 50% in 2022.
Most CISOs have returned to the elevated concerns they experienced early in the pandemic, according to Proofpoint.
Globally, 68% of surveyed CISOs feel at risk of a material cyber attack, compared to 48% the year before, when they may have felt a brief sense of calm after successfully navigating the chaos of the pandemic.
This year's data represents a shift back to 2021, when nearly two thirds of CISOs believed a material attack was imminent. It's notable that UK CISOs feel most at risk globally (84%) in 2023, compared to 60% last year and 81% in 2021.
While organizations have largely overcome the disruptions of the last two years, the effects of the Great Resignation and employee turnover continue to linger, exacerbated by the recent wave of mass layoffs-It's interesting to see that 73% of CISOs believe they have adequate data protection in place yet 74% of UK security leaders had to deal with the loss of sensitive information in the past 12 months.
There is a trend to these data loss events also, as 84% of UK CISOs say that employees leaving the organization played a role in a data spill.
Boost your organization's potential with comprehensive data governance, from C-suite support to data quality assurance, retention rules and more.
As critical as data is for organizations to flourish in today's economy, simply collecting and storing data without a data governance policy leaves an organization without a structure to handle the information.
Only 49% of enterprise decisions are driven by data and only 10% are powered by insights, said Arnab Sen, Tredence, Inc. vice president of data engineering. Yet it's the data that will provide more benefits. 'C-level leaders and teams are developing strong data management programs that can evolve to meet the latest business, customer, operational and regulatory requirements.'
Having closed its last data center, the aerospace and defense contractor's IT division is delving deeper into cloud-native applications to optimize performance, scalability, and costs in the cloud.
These days, to serve the backbone corporate needs for more than 100,000 employees globally means betting big on the cloud.
That's what James Hannah, SVP and global CIO of General Dynamics Information Technology, has done in support of the Reston, Va.-based aerospace and defense contractor's 10 business units, each of which has its own CIO who works autonomously to make decisions about each division's use of digital technologies for its unique business.
Boards love to say they have low risk tolerance, but are they willing to make the expensive and painful decisions to make it truly happen?
It is becoming common for boards of directors to choose a low level of risk tolerance for the enterprise. The problem is that the action typically stops there, with the absence of any new directives to the CEO or the CFO to make different decisions in support.
The optimum next steps don't necessarily involve more money, though increased cybersecurity funding is the most obvious and often necessary move. It can also involve granting authority to make the changes needed to upgrade the enterprise's risk position.
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