The Surprise Factor: Why now is the time to invest in IT innovation

CIOs have a unique opportunity to become architects and enablers of elastic business strategies

The history of business suggests that there are many merits to doing the unexpected: to zig when others zag, to go high when others go low and to take the road less travelled.

The pandemic has caused massive economic shocks for businesses and public-sector organisations across Europe and it's not surprising that those facing existential business crises have gone into their shells and resorted to slash-and-burn strategies. For years, many CIOs have been asked to do more with less. Now they have been asked to do even more with even less as IT budgets have been savaged and top-line costs have gone into the firing line.

The natural instinct for many CEOs in times of crisis is to batten down the hatches and concentrate on cutting costs rather than seeking to make new and speculative investments. Very often, broad-brush leadership actions mean IT getting the same, across the board treatment as peers. But what is interesting is that, even against this backdrop, out of such seismic events, there are often lessons learned and a smarter, more creative strategy emerges.

The recession of the early 1990s, for example, saw a surge in buying PCs from clone vendors, a march to generic x86 servers and a boom in application outsourcing. Companies like Dell boomed by making lemons from lemonade while hardware behemoths such as IBM and Digital flagged and the market never went back to paying premium prices for name-brand badges on commoditised products.

What we have seen in our People-ledTransformation study is that the events of the Covid period have been the catalyst for companies around the world to embrace change. For example, a resounding 84 per cent of global decision makers told us they are accelerating their digital transformation plans as a result of the pandemic.

Obviously there have been calls for more sympathetic financing options but we also see an accelerated push towards cloud ‘as a service' models where costs are spread in favour of operating expenditure and upfront Capex is rejected. Again, in our study 86 per cent of global decision makers said the cloud offered more flexibility and more than two-thirds expecting their enterprise applications to be fully cloud-based in the next two years.

We've also observed a push to flexible working as office workers have perforce become remote workers. So far, so expected, but there are other, more interesting, changes afoot.

Our research showed that companies are becoming more agile in their planning and innovating faster to respond to user demands for more freedom to access IT from anywhere, better collaboration tools and more automation to reduce workloads.

There is a cost in doing nothing and inertia and failure to confront change are the silent, passive killers of enterprise growth

In this crisis, and across Europe, the People-led Transformation study revealed global decision makers are focused on investments in innovation to enable the flexibility of remote working, encourage collaboration and empower employees to be more productive, as well as meet customer demands. This might be seen as a bold or even foolhardy move, especially among mid-market organisations that do not necessarily have huge budgets, but our research show businesses are focusing investment around building simple and intuitive user interfaces, automation to speed up workflows and enabling users to communicate with enterprise applications with their preferred tools such as Slack and WhatsApp.

It seems a paradox - why invest now? But there is a cost in doing nothing and inertia and failure to confront change are the silent, passive killers of enterprise growth. CIOs must be bold and lead. IT remains a relatively small part of business outgoings and they have a once-in-a-career window of opportunity to make a watertight business case for new projects that root out costs and lead to better, more adaptive options with clear ROI attached to them. Find opportunities to be aggressive but also creative and once you do that, you might be surprised at your approval hit rate because we're seeing nine in ten such cases go ahead. But ensure you have a clear focus on forward-looking activities and recruit specialist help: this is no time to add to the admin burden of existing teams exhausted by fire-fighting.

This is a new age: we were edging towards it anyway but now we are seeing giant strides and those changes are progressive and positive. Anybody who has seen lock-in as a vendor strategy won't want to repeat the experience. Nobody wants monolithic software slabs when elegant microservices and federated best of breed services can deliver better results, faster and with minimal risk. The chance is there for CIOs to become architects and enablers of elastic business strategies and today, relatively free of the daily commute and the usual red tape of office life, are saying they have more time to explore strategic options, to speak to peers and to think. They should seize the day and not go back.

Tom Dehouck is Regional President Europe at Unit4