CIOs Face Barriers to Business Transformation

While most CIOs embrace the opportunity to help transform their organization's business, a wide range of tech-specific obstacles are getting in the way, according to a recent survey from Brocade. The resulting report, titled "Global CIO Study 2015: Taking Up the Task of Business Transformation," indicates that the majority of CIOs harbor doubts about their ability to deliver the right kind of new IT services to drive business growth. Even more CIOs question whether they and their IT teams are getting the most that they can out of analytics and data mining. Meanwhile, employees create challenges thanks to their "fast and furious" accessing of numerous apps from multiple devices. And, of course, there's always a building sense of pressure to keep operating costs down. For CIOs to overcome all of this, they must take advantage of what's called the "new IP," an enabler that accelerates business growth through innovation-centric, software-enabled networking. "The role of IT is changing from being an administrator of infrastructure to becoming an enabler of the business–driving innovation and new ways of working to revolutionize customer engagement and transactional processes," said Ken Cheng, CTO and senior vice president of corporate development and emerging business for Brocade. "More than ever, the CIO has a critical role in advising the board and senior management on strategic business investments. But legacy infrastructure remains a major roadblock, prohibiting business agility and innovation. The new IP offers a way of addressing this, enabling business objectives to be met." An estimated 200 global CIOs took part in the research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne.