Tech adoption and digital transformation accelerated over the past two years, and those changes have impacted Chief Information Officers’ roles and priorities and how their performance is evaluated. Here are four predictions about how 2022 will impact the CIOs you work with and what they need from your software development company.
In 2022, CIOs won’t just be measured by standard KPIs of raw availability and uptime, but the value they create for the business.
“Capacity at cost” will become a key factor when determining any CIO’s success. In years past, overhead has not been considered the primary business driver. The math used to be Platform Capacity/units-of-work; now it’s (Platform+Operations Overhead)/units-of-work. This significantly raises the cost per unit of work analysis, and the pressure is on CIOs to drive that cost down over time. In the past, it was quite common to treat operational costs as a fixed burden, and as capacity grew so did the overhead at the same rate. Today, the overhead portion must decrease as economies of scale are expected. The same reliability and performance of the infrastructure is expected, but the operational plans must become smarter, to do more with less.
CIOs will look to streamline operations best practices and use workflow automation and no-code tools to work smarter and achieve their department-wide goals. Operational plans that would have required 100 engineers working old school can now be done by 20 well-informed, well-equipped and highly effective/efficient engineers, and CIOs will start to structure their divisions accordingly.
Automation will catalyze adoption in 2022.
There is an outstanding misconception that automation is only for the hardest of problems, with big budgets and software engineering teams of developers needed. The use of easier-to-adopt, “approachable” network automation will become a cornerstone of 2022, and anyone utilizing smarter, automation-centric network operations tools will succeed.
Automation will be applied more and more to solve routine issues. According to NetBrain’s recent assessments of multiple customer service ticket data sets, nearly 80% of all service tickets can be grouped into less than a half-dozen types of work with each one of these types repeated thousands of times per month. When customers automate the solution for these volume ticket types, they see a force-multiplier in reducing ticket overhead and freeing up time for IT staff to focus on innovation initiatives.
Digital transformation in 2022 will increasingly target upgrading legacy operations.
While numerous processes have transformed, many have not, and in some cases the transformation of services may have occurred, but the means to maintain those now digital processes are often still mired in old operational practices.
The transformed PLATFORM and its OPERATIONS envelope must both transform and in 2022 we will see that comprehensive platform and operational plan transformation take hold.
As the pandemic continues, nearly all industries will continue their adoption of increasingly distributed technologies across all of their business service delivery platforms. This will necessitate strategic support plans that treat the extended end-to-end infrastructure as the primary infrastructure. Specific and integrated support across the multiple network domains involved in end-to-end delivery will be key to an organization’s success.
Knowledge and experience will become highly sought-after resources so organizations can build a scalable training framework.
The most experienced Subject Matter Experts will be identified, and great length will be taken to capture their expertise and make it transportable and shareable. No longer will the concept of ‘heroes’ be viewed as a good thing. In fact, the existence of technical heroes will be a red flag for higher business risk as those heroes are both short in supply and (due to the pandemic) may consider other life choices. Technologies will be sought that allow these experts to codify their expertise and allow it to be applied in perpetuity and shared globally by others.
As part of that, training and certifications for automation technologies need to be a central focus of operational skilling programs, including demonstrating to staff that automation creates jobs and career opportunities for their advancement. New hires need to be encouraged to think and execute smarter and they need to be equipped with and trained on using the tools that enable this.
