newsroom

Again, we find ourselves on the precipice of a new year, facing the prospect of making resolutions for 2017. CIOs are no different; they resolve to hone in on measures that will add business value to their organizations. Here are some New Year’s resolutions for CIOs to consider for 2017.

1. Work as closely as possible with your company’s business side

Running a well-performing IT environment is a valuable accomplishment. But today’s CIO is expected to contribute to the growth and profitability of the company as well. To achieve this objective, IT leaders know they need to build stronger connections between IT and business teams.

To succeed today, CIOs and other C-suite executives must cooperate to provide strong leadership in technology investments that drive value for your company. An IBM sponsored survey by Harvard Business Review confirms that at leading companies, IT doesn’t just deliver services, but also helps develop the digital strategy. Here are a few tips for CIOs to consider in the coming year:

• Understand and communicate the business value that technology can bring to the organization.
• Learn the competitive and security concerns that are keeping business executives up at night, and align IT goals to these concerns.
• Actively foster cooperation between IT and the business, identifying and bringing together problem solvers on both sides of the boardroom table.

It is critical for IT teams to build tight organizational linkages with both lines of business and with company executives.  After all, before you know it, you’ll soon find yourself thinking about resolutions for 2018.

2. Conduct a security audit

Today’s disruptive technologies such as analytics, cognitive, big data, Internet of Things, mobile and social computing, make staying secure exceptionally challenging. They deliver big benefits while creating more points of entry that can potentially be exploited. The beginning of a new year is a good time to take stock of security implications for the business environment:

• Step back and review to identify and fill gaps and gain insight to prioritize security investments.
• Build a next-generation security ops center with intelligence-driven capabilities.
• Manage the digital identity lifecycle of people and devices.

CIOs can also look at whether the business is appropriately protecting the right entities.

3. Get a handle on your cloud environment

Some organizations start as born-on-the-cloud businesses and later want to place some resources on premises. Others have traditional IT and want to extend some of their on-premises business processes to the cloud. And many organizations have public cloud solutions deployed by departments other than IT, with potential consequences for enterprise security.

A hybrid cloud that combines on-premises and public cloud platforms has become the new norm for organizations such as these. Businesses gain a variety of competitive advantages when deploying a hybrid cloud — they can augment their on-site infrastructure with public cloud resources to meet seasonal demand spikes, keep pace with rapid growth and develop new applications. Hybrid clouds also help accelerate transformation to a digital enterprise through cloud-enabled systems of engagement designed to maximize the web and mobile customer experiences.

4. Investigate cognitive computing

Across all industries, CIOs are acutely aware of the need to capitalize on unstructured data in all its forms. This has become particularly important now that customers expect businesses to deliver personalized interactions and self-service options. How can hidden insights that reside in data be more fully harnessed for discovery, insight, decision support and dialogue? The answer is cognitive computing.

Cognitive systems understand unstructured data through sensing and interaction. They reason about data by generating and considering hypotheses, responses and recommendations. Cognitive systems also learn not only from initial training but from every interaction by applying machine learning algorithms.

Any organization can benefit from cognitive systems’ enhanced decision making support and evidence-based recommendations. IBM cognitive capabilities are now available online through the IBM Bluemix platform, so organizations can embed them in their own applications. Whether leveraging cloud or on-premises configurations, IBM Cognitive computing offers you the solution to fit your needs.

5. Evaluate your infrastructure

As the pace of innovation and change accelerates, CIOs are increasingly tasked with ensuring competitive advantage for their companies. Today, that responsibility requires an infrastructure designed for big data and complex analytics. Organizations need to rapidly capture the largest volume and variety of data to develop insights faster than the competition and provide a better customer experience.

Since data is vital, storage that consistently delivers high performance is essential. A low-latency, all-flash array, such as IBM FlashSystem, Storwize, or DeepFlash 150, helps sustain the performance level needed to feed modern databases and analytic systems.

Providing both fast data retrieval and powerful processing can support advanced analytics and cognitive computing. They require an IT infrastructure that combines IBM Power Systems servers, flash storage and hardware accelerators.

The end of the year is a great time to commit to positive actions, whether they are personal or business oriented. For IT leaders, the top five New Year’s resolutions listed here can be the start of a successful and profitable 2017. Happy New Year!

The post Top five New Year’s resolutions for CIOs appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.