The past two years have been challenging for everyone, not least of all the technology leaders in companies who have suddenly had to restructure their operating environments to accommodate employees working in different ways as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, constant change is nothing new for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and other technology leaders in organizations who increasingly face unique challenges as they navigate an ongoing landscape of rapid technological change, security threats and skills shortages across the industry in 2022.
Table of contents
Changing priorities for the CIO in 2022
How the COVID-19 pandemic is shaping top CIO goals in 2022
The top 9 CIO priorities for 2022
The CIO has an important role to play within an organization, and it is a role that is often evolving to expand and encompass different skills, responsibilities, and knowledge.
A 2017 PriceWaterhouseCoopers study, The Changing Role of the CIO, found that to cope with new business structures and issues, increasingly CIOs need to play roles with business strategy, customer engagement, business growth, and business leadership.
CIOs need to have a thorough understanding of their company and its business objectives – they are no longer just responsible for overseeing IT departments and systems run smoothly. This is because of IT’s central role in ensuring the productivity and profitability of an organization and how IT systems are the lynchpin to project and product successes or failures.
This holistic understanding of the business and the external business landscape and the needs of customers and stakeholders helps today’s CIO to be responsive in the decision-making process to ensure the smooth delivery of the IT department’s KPIs.
According to a recent KPMG survey, technology leaders want more influence within their organizations and a silver lining of the COVID19 pandemic is that this is increasing. The survey found more than six in 10 CIOs felt like they are more influential within their companies as a result of the response to the pandemic.
Faramaz Faharani, Principal Consultant & former CIO with Federated Co-operatives and Sofina Foods, says that the pandemic has brought many new CIO challenges, but at the same time it hasn’t reduced any of the pre-pandemic challenges.
“CIOs still had their cybersecurity, regulatory requirements, talent scarcity, data privacy and security, multiple competing priorities, legacy applications and digital transformation challenges, to name a few, but they also had to deal with the impact of COVID-19,” he said.
“I firmly believe that the number one priority in 2022 for CIOs should be addressing the tech talent shortage. CIOs should take the lead in encouraging and enabling their organization to take a three-prong approach to address this.”
He says the first step should be investing in developing internal talents.
“CIOs should take the lead in investing the necessary resources to develop talented employees, rather than fighting over the same limited pool of talents in the market. This will also improve employee retention rates, productivity, corporate culture and employees; a sense of belonging.”
He also says that organizations should develop internship pipelines to nurture talent.
“Organizations should develop a clear plan to attract students from various disciplines, not just the tech-focused programs. More importantly, CIOs should work with their teams to build actionable agendas for interns, so they can be trained quickly and engaged in meaningful activities to make them productive team members,” he said.
The final step that organizations need to take is to restructure their IT teams and tasks to attract highly-skilled semi-retired tech talent, avoiding the mistake of doing so haphazardly.
“As in the case of interns, CIOs should work with HR to create roles and related job descriptions which focus specifically on this segment of the talent pool. Job postings should clearly target this group. There is a tremendous untapped talent pool that is barely utilized,” he said.
With all this in mind, these are the top challenges that the CIO can expect to prioritize in 2022 and beyond are not too dissimilar to the top CIO priorities from 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic saw a range of new challenges present themselves for CIOs, adding new areas of complexity to the mix. CIOs had to pivot quickly to ensure that their organizations' information systems were able to continue functioning under a challenging set of circumstances.
While much of this is now embedded in organizations, it will continue to have an effect in 2022 - especially when there is still no end in sight to remote working in many parts of the world - or, indeed, it may become the “new normal” for many organizations.
As part of the expectation the CIO needs to take on a more strategic role in their company, this includes an expectation they will be responsible for driving necessary digital transformation across the business.
The rapid response to COVID-19 last year highlighted this, and this will continue into 2022 and beyond.
According to a McKinsey survey, organizations are reporting that their digital transformation has accelerated by seven years during the last year, as organizations shift to embrace the needs of both employees, customers and other stakeholders alike.
This includes the balancing act of ensuring the systems are performing well while investing in new infrastructure and fostering innovation to help the business compete in a constantly changing business landscape.
Internal clients rely on IT systems functioning and being available to them around the clock in order to do their jobs… this is the reality of business life in the 21st century. Unstable systems, outages, slow responses from IT when support is required are frustrating for internal customers and they have little patience when things don’t work – particularly if problems are frequent and the same issues recur, unresolved.
The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report found that 47 % of IT spend in companies is now falling outside the remit of the CIO’s budget while other areas of business invest in their own IT systems and infrastructure.
This is blamed on IT’s traditional inability to respond quickly and flexibly to the business’ requirements.
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The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the only type of disruption that is a top priority for CIOs in 2022. Industry disruptors have changed the business landscape for good across many different industries. As companies have had to respond to these incursions into their traditionally held marketplace, entire business models have needed to be rethought in order to compete. In many instances, disrupters have caused companies to collapse.
For the CIO the challenge will depend on their company’s industry: are the threats there already, or are they likely to come soon? Being placed to respond to new systems and technology required to compete with new business models within the industry is crucial.
In doing this the CIO needs to be constantly eyeing the future so they can launch new projects and initiatives quickly in order to protect their company’s market share.
A recent Gartner report found that 63 % of senior executives believed that a talent shortage in IT was a key concern facing their organization.
The rapid growth and change in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and automation, has meant that there are more requirements for IT specialists within an organization. Unfortunately, there is also a problem finding someone with the niche skill set to fill these roles.
This has created a global skills-gap shortage. And if a CIO is lucky enough to have found the right people for the job, hanging on to them is also a challenge because they are so in demand, a company with more money and a better cultural fit could lure them away.
Cybersecurity has been one of the top CIO priorities for many years now and 2022 will be no different. They need to have a proactive mindset in this area in order to constantly ensure their company’s systems are secure and protected from internal and external threats.
As 2021 drew to an end, CIOs were scrambling to mitigate the impacts of a critical vulnerability to Java-based software known as ‘Log4j” which is an emerging major threat that could potentially put many systems at risk. If left unpatched, cyber attackers could use this vulnerability to take over entire computer servers, devices and applications. Employees are the biggest risk to any organization when it comes to cybersecurity… from deliberate acts of espionage by disgruntled, disaffected or corrupt employees through to laziness or negligence, the risk within any company lies with those who have been trusted with access to the systems.
Read more: How to raise cyber security awareness
Cybercrime is constantly evolving and threats become more and more sophisticated. This includes viruses, malware, ransomware, phishing, and hacking. And business is booming for cybercriminals everywhere – even the best CIO is not immune from these challenges
A recent report from RiskIQ found that every single minute, cybercriminals cost the global economy $2.9 million, with a global annual cost of $1.5 trillion.
Staying ahead of new and emerging threats, identifying ongoing risks, ensuring systems are protected and employees are educated appropriately on cybersecurity risks will be a top priority to protect systems and data from this ongoing and increasing threat.
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How customer data is stored – including health and financial information – has been a focus for regulators around the world in recent years, most notably in the form of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It’s expected these requirements will follow in other jurisdictions as the public are increasingly savvy and concerned about information that is kept about them by third parties.
The CIO has a critical role to play in this to ensure that the company is complying with these regulations and that any future changes to systems will continue to comply. The risk of non-compliance can be hefty penalties and other legal issues, as well as negative publicity and reputational damage.
Budgets cause a headache at the best of times, but residual problems from last year might really put the squeeze on IT budgets in some organizations, depending on how badly things went economically last year.
The CIO will have to refocus the budget in 2022, depending on how the pandemic affected both the sector the business operates in, and how the business itself was affected. For example, if the company has to change its business model entirely this will have a different effect on the IT budget compared with whether there is more demand for digital products from customers.
According to a survey of top CIOs by IDG research, 50% of IT leaders say that they expect they will have an increase in their budgets for the year ending May 2022, while 8% say they expect it to decrease. However, 49% of CIOs say that lack of budget is looking like it will be one of their main challenges for the year ahead.
Towards the end of 2021, Microsoft announced it would begin distributing its long-anticipated new operating system, Windows 11, to eligible computers. It is anticipated that the roll out of Windows 11 across the corporate world will take some time, and all eligible devices will be offered upgrades by mid-2022. CIOs will need to begin preparing for this deployment in their organizations, and also determining what the impacts will be on existing systems and workflows.
CIOs have really needed to step up and help take their companies to new heights over recent years, and 2022 will be no exception. They’ll have to juggle many balls of accountability and make wise and informed business decisions.
And while their roles are expanding into other areas not traditionally held by the CIO, the ongoing IT needs and IT investment decisions are still just as important and need to be factored into their daily agendas.
These CIO goals may need to be achieved on a shrinking budget, so looking for ways to do things more efficiently while still delivering on corporate priorities and expectations is crucial.
One of the savviest IT investment decisions a CIO could make in 2022 is DeskAlerts, which can help with many of the challenges to improve communication in the organization, take the pressure off the help desk and improve its internal reputation, and strengthen the cybersecurity culture in the organization.
Contact us today to find out more about how DeskAlerts can help IT leaders in your company to deliver on the priorities and challenges expected in 2022 and beyond.
CIOs have a range of important functions expected of them in 2022. These include:
CIOs are concerned with a range of issues that affect the delivery of IT services within a company. This can include ensuring the IT department is properly staffed with employees who have the right skills, ensuring that the organization has the right hardware and software for its needs, implementing data and cybersecurity protections, and investing in technology that will see the company remain competitive into the future.
There are different pathways to becoming a CIO, but in general, you will need a bachelor’s degree. Your college major could be in IT, computer science, IT management, project management or management information systems. Some companies may require that their CIO has graduate qualifications, while others may want them to have a mixture of qualifications including a Master of Business Administration.
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