Trends and mostly cloudy priorities for CIOs in 2023

As businesses globally continue to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic's aftermath and navigate unpredictable economic conditions, they are making significant changes to their operations and how they provide services.

The prospect of a recession is compelling businesses to focus more intently on their financial health and on providing value to customers, along with efforts to expand their customer base. As a result, CIOs will have to manage two potentially contradictory needs in 2023: enabling new services to achieve a competitive advantage and decreasing costs.

Many businesses have succeeded by consolidating their tech stacks and moving more of their key business applications to the cloud. Moving systems to the cloud also promise to open up new analytics options, giving businesses more insight in light of the erratic state of the economy.

CIOs will face pressure in 2023 to utilize technology that can foster business agility, and they will need to address the following eight major industry trends and priorities.

A unified tech vision

CIOs will need to create a unified vision for technology, which will need a shift from how many large international corporations have previously dealt with acquired businesses and with different lines of business, which was to allow them to maintain their own technology stacks. CIOs will be more responsible for consolidating these tech stacks in 2023 to boost performance. Nevertheless, building a singular technical vision is easier said than done. To choose which collection of technologies — including cloud environments, ERP systems, business intelligence (BI) platforms, and CRM tools — will be the organization's foundation, CIOs must collaborate closely with C-level and other business leaders. These foundational technologies will incorporate inherited and legacy technology.

The difficulties come in many forms. Every CRM, ERP, BI, and cloud solution offers its advantages. Training on the new systems will be required for the teams and business units utilizing legacy systems. System integration and data migration need specialized knowledge, effort, and time.

Setting the stage for next-generation services

Additionally, CIOs are setting the stage for adopting several promising technologies at various stages of development. They consist of Web 3.0, IoT, next-generation analytics, and the metaverse. Most businesses are pursuing several concurrent efforts regarding the condition of technological services in the future, ranging from operational effectiveness to the metaverse setting. When evaluating these new technologies, CIOs must consider the potential for cost savings and new monetization opportunities associated with improving customer experiences. This, however, can be a difficult balancing act. Businesses lose momentum and efficiency when they concentrate on numerous IT initiatives. Before these digital projects lose their impact, the CIO must direct the enterprise's resources to ensure they are all executed and integrated seamlessly.

Managing cloud costs

CIOs are being pushed to prioritize cost control initiatives in 2023 by the current economic turmoil, including layoffs and reduced IT spending expectations. Cloud spend analysis and ROI analysis are at the top of the list. More CFOs are paying attention to cloud spend and occasionally boardroom attention.

CEOs now expect CIOs to create a strategy for weighing the advantages of automation against the expenses of the cloud. The "cloud paradox" refers to using the cloud to enhance agility, scale, and resiliency but at the risk of decreasing profit margins. CIOs frequently find themselves in this situation, especially if the organization started its cloud journey without a cost optimization strategy. The most promising technologies may be in jeopardy because of reactive cost-cutting. CIOs must eliminate waste by locating underutilized instances, renegotiating cloud contracts, and fostering a culture of cost consciousness when using the cloud.

Migrating core business apps to the cloud

Most of the enterprise is now starting to catch up to early cloud implementations, often involving cutting-edge new applications. Compared to previous years' cautious attitude, CIOs will promote increased cloud adoption for core business applications like CRM, supply chain management, ERP, human resources management systems, and other line-of-business applications in 2023.

In addition, business analytics will increasingly adopt a cloud-first approach, along with applications focused on new technologies and digital transformation, such as IoT.

The key benefit of migrating core business applications to the cloud is the greater visibility of accurate and reliable business data delivered quickly, effectively, and economically. The pandemic in recent years has made the need for this kind of technology even more urgent.

Driving product innovation with industry clouds

Industry clouds will be the next big thing for CIOs and the cloud. These new platforms assist businesses in addressing new use cases more quickly and efficiently by using preconfigured solutions tailored to specific industries. Despite the upcoming uncertainty, the industry cloud will assist CIOs in securing every bit of optimization and innovation to boost operations, products, and businesses.

Unified data management architecture

CIOs will need to create a unified architecture for data management. As businesses modernize their technology stacks and data platforms, a major motivator is the expanding selection of SaaS, PaaS, and cloud platforms. The underlying data must be orchestrated to provide the appropriate information to apps, platforms, staff, clients, and other constituents.

Aspects of data orchestration are beginning to be addressed by a number of middleware platforms. None now supports all use cases for transactional, analytical, data science, and streaming. In order to meet these use cases, CIOs create a holistic data management architecture that places the many tools in a modular, efficient, and safe manner. The conventional extract, transform, and load (ETL) and extract, load, and transform (ELT) tools, middleware, data lakes and lakehouses, messaging applications, reverse ETL, and cloud data warehouses are some technologies.

It is advisable to construct a flexible blueprint in the short-to-medium-term, identify the technical debt of projects using quickly evolving technology, and design a corrective action plan. The alternative would result in a proliferation of data silos, out-of-tune apps, a low-trust environment where each fact must be verified numerous times, and dissatisfied stakeholders.

Data products

Traditionally, centralized IT teams have managed data as a commodity. Companies are increasingly delegating the task of producing their own data products to business teams familiar with the data source. Because of this, the IT department can give each business unit access to the proper self-service data provisioning architecture while stepping back from actively maintaining the data itself.

Business teams will need to interact using data from many groups securely, and CIOs will need to devise a solution. In order to automate governance, security, privacy, and quality, new architectures like data mesh and data fabrics will need to be used. New data observability tools will also aid in monitoring and enhancing this self-service data architecture.

Technology for sustainability

Expect the work of the CIO to become even more challenging in 2023 as CIOs are tasked with supporting circularity and sustainability activities involving carbon reduction.

Organizations are asking CIOs and tech teams to speed up progress as they grow and operationalize their sustainability projects. In order to demonstrate how they can help an organization achieve its net-zero and sustainability goals, CIOs must be able to speak the language of business in addition to putting together solutions from other parts of their tech estates.

CIOs will be required to evaluate new software, analytics, standards, and frameworks and, most crucially, separate industry initiatives that advance sustainability goals from those being hyped up.