FEATURE: SMART INVESTMENTS
5. Measure impact, not just output. Uptime and ticket counts matter, but they don’ t tell the whole story. Track how quickly teams learn new tools, how many tests lead to real improvements, and what users think. These measures show if innovation and resilience are growing together.
CIOs today must blend strategy with culture. By asking the right questions, investing in the right places, and keeping humans at the centre, you’ ll build an organisation that can change fast and stay solid.
Africa’ s history of doing more with less means we’ re already great at smart, lean innovation. It’ s our time to lead the way – by showing the world how to balance
bold moves with a strong foundation.
Michael Brink, Chief Technology Officer( CTO) of CASA Software:
Technology innovation continues to accelerate at an unprecedented rate. It is transforming many aspects of business and personal life, essentially reshaping the future, disrupting industries and is expected to accelerate business success.
The list of innovations is expansive and includes: AI leveraging institutional intellectual property( IP) and data; cybersecurity and risk management; overseeing digital value streams; optimising operations and ensuring Business Continuity. Many analysts agree that all of the foregoing are key focus areas for investment and should, therefore, form part of any CIO’ s list of priorities.
Perhaps AI and AI literacy should feature at the top of the list, but organisations can only really make AI work once they fully understand and manage their data. Moreover, the data usually remains restricted to specific systems and applications, so breaking down data silos while establishing a strong data foundation is another preceding key element.
Agentic AI can significantly enhance IT operations by automating tasks like fault finding, identification and correlation as well as automated remediation, accelerating triage and root cause determination. CIOs should embrace the use of AI and Observability solutions for IT Operations. For business operations Agentic AI can enhance productivity by automating routine tasks allowing employees to focus on high-value activities.
To ensure Business Continuity investing in the automated orchestration of Disaster Recovery plans ensures Business Continuity is a smart option, it improves organisational resilience and reduces operational costs.
The digital attack surface continues to grow and cyberinsurgents are becoming more sophisticated, making it harder to protect sensitive data and systems. CIOs and CISOs must adopt a proactive approach to cybersecurity that includes advanced security measures, including AI-driven threat detection and response, to safeguard the business. The accumulation of unresolved security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations within an application, also known as application security debt, can also increase risk which again AI capabilities can be used to manage and mitigate.
While it remains challenging for CIOs to manage and prioritise these investments, value stream management integrated with FinOps can be a game changer. It improves transparency, aligns business objectives with work delivery, and fosters efficiency by creating a shared purpose. This in turn reduces wasted investment and effort, allowing you to gain a real-time view of plans, funding and progress which makes it easier to identify risks, dependencies and opportunities for improvement.
Closely coupled and integrated to these value streams is balancing cloud and on-premises systems for the so-called sustainability versus cost sweet spot. After all, the cloud itself is also just an on-premises system somewhere else. Over the longer-term savvy CIOs will prioritise focus on the organisational ability to seamlessly migrate between cloud platforms whether private or public. Cloud Portability refers to this ability to move applications, workloads, and data seamlessly between different cloud environments( public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud) without requiring major modifications or disruptions. This includes shifting workloads across cloud service providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud or migrating between onpremises and cloud-based infrastructures.
CIOS SHOULD EMBRACE THE USE OF AI AND
OBSERVABILITY SOLUTIONS FOR IT OPERATIONS.
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