By Deepak Pargaonkar, VP, Solution Engineering, Salesforce India
While businesses continuously navigate the unprecedented times today, digital transformation is critical to navigating the growing economic downturn businesses are experiencing today. Here’s four IT investment predictions heading into 2023.
The pivotal role of a CIO
Today, CIOs can increase their relevance and ability to deliver business value by bringing a new set of skills and operating processes to the executive table during a radically different business environment. This begins by truly understanding broader business needs — what are the priorities, the pain points, the processes, the investments and, most importantly, the technologies their colleagues are dealing with.
It is imperative for CIOs to adopt a continuous improvement mindset. A CIO now has to walk into board meetings and assure the stakeholders that they’ve got everything under control from a cyber and security point of view, while also ensuring they have enough technology knowledge to make the right decisions that will set the company up for success in the future.
This is called business intimacy, and it is key to better understanding the strategic priorities of business partners across sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, HR, finance, and other teams.
Digital Transformation with continue to be a competitive advantage
In times of tough economic headwinds, the pressure to make cuts and deliver efficiency savings and productivity improvements is irresistible. However, the evidence of the economic downturns of 2008-2009 and 2020 from McKinseyand Bain suggests that only seeking efficiency savings during tough economic conditions comes at a risk: roughly one in 10 companies manages to outgrow its peers both during downturns and in the subsequent recovery.
The big challenge for 2023 will be to avoid leaning too far in the direction of cost savings and efficiencies and so risk losing the advantage on that next economic upswing.
Surge in automation investments
Automation drives efficient growth, enhances productivity, and generates much-needed cost savings amid economic uncertainty. For example, Salesforce’s suite of automation technologies saves customers over 100 billion hours every month. To drive significant impact in 2023, organizations must adopt more strategic, enterprise-wide automation or hyper-automation initiatives.
Many are already doing so, as 80% of organizations report that hyper-automation is on their technology roadmap for the next 24 months. To achieve the potential of these initiatives, integration and composability are essential ingredients for digital strategies in the coming year. Investment in automation is only bound to surge as companies aim to do more with less
Composability will drive business innovation and agility
Though demand on IT teams is increasing, resources remain constrained, so organizations will need ways of doing more with what they already have. In 2023, there will be a renewed focus on using a composable digital strategy to meet that need: creating reusable business capabilities to drive efficiency, agility, and optionality at scale.