Key predictions that will impact CIOs and IT pros over the next five years

Time for action is growing short for CIOs in the digital era. Many continue to struggle with siloed digital transformation initiatives, leaving them adrift and buffeted by competition and market forces.

cio predictions 2020

To support CIOs with guidance on complex, fast-moving environments and prescriptive, actionable recommendations, IDC published IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2020 Predictions. The predictions provide a strategic context that will enable CIOs to lead their organizations through a period of hyperscale, hyperspeed, and hyperconnectedness over the next five years.

They also lay out IDC’s vision for the ten most important shifts that will happen in IT organizations over the next 60 months and will help senior IT executives form their strategic IT plans.

“While there has been no single ‘year of reckoning’ for CIOs in the digital era, time for action is growing short, as competitors are accelerating their digital efforts. The ten predictions in this study define the concrete actions that CIOs can and must take to create digital-native ‘future enterprises,'” said Serge Findling, vice president of Research for IDC‘s IT Executive Programs (IEP).

“In this hyperspeed, hyperscale, and hyperconnected phase of digital transformation, CIOs must rapidly transform their organizations to become the Future IT.”

List of predictions

Prediction 1: By 2024 the IT strategy for 80% of digitally advanced organizations will evolve to a broad, flexible, self-service mashup of digital tools to replace the “walled-garden” IT-as-an-Enabler model.

Prediction 2: By 2023, 65% of CIOs will be entrepreneurial leaders who evolve their organizations into centers of excellence that engineer enterprise-wide collaboration and innovation.

Prediction 3: Driven both by escalating cyber threats and needed new functionality, 65% of enterprises will aggressively modernize legacy systems with extensive new technology platform investments through 2023.

Prediction 4: By 2023, as a pillar of their IT multicloud approach, 70% of IT organizations will implement a strategic container/abstraction/API playbook to enhance application portability and hosting flexibility.

Prediction 5: By 2022, 70% of IT organizations will have transitioned from builders and operators to designer and integrators of digital solutions that come to define every product, service, or process.

Prediction 6: Through 2023, 80% of IT organizations will accelerate software development to enable them to deploy at least weekly code updates/revisions and business value delivery.

Prediction 7: By 2022, as innovation becomes synonymous with disruption, 40% of CIOs will co-lead innovation, articulating digital visions and infusing intelligence enterprise-wide.

Prediction 8: Through 2022, deployment of artificial intelligence to augment, streamline, and accelerate IT operations will be a principal IT transformation (ITX) initiative for 60% of enterprise IT organizations.

Prediction 9: Through 2024, 75% of CIOs will reshape all IT resources, including budgets, assets, and talent, to support real-time resource allocation and enterprise agility, dramatically reducing fixed costs.

Prediction 10: By 2023, driven by the mandate to deliver engaging, agile, continuous learning fueled workspaces, 60% of CIOs will implement formal employee experience programs.

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