According to an ICT Journal study, one third of IT managers in French-speaking Switzerland say that digital transformation and innovation are their top priorities for 2017. While in a survey conducted by Deloitte, most Swiss CIOs consider that the threat of competitors driving innovation has increased over the past two years.
Digital transformation, security required
A significant development in the investigation concerns safety. Only one IT manager in the sample does not see this as a high priority. 2016 has gone through this with multiple cases of stolen data and other DDoS attacks made public. An IT manager recently confided in the ICT editorial team just how much the job of the CIO is now a natural fuse in the event of a security incident. And the risk to reputation will increase further with the entry into force in spring 2018 of the European Data Protection Regulation, which will require Swiss companies operating in Europe to announce cases of customer data leaks.
Growing interest in disruptive technologies
In terms of technology, the survey shows an increasing use of SaaS solutions and "social" collaborative tools, which are deployed in twice as many companies as a year ago.
Other more recent areas, such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and wearables are, as last year, on the radar of many companies, but despite constant innovation their adoption has not progressed. The most significant development concerns artificial intelligence, which is of interest to 61% of the CIOs surveyed, twice as much as last year. Gartner and Forrester analysts see it as one of the strategic technologies for 2017, along with the Internet of Things and virtual reality.
Here again, it will be interesting to analyze in a year whether this interest in artificial intelligence has led to pilot projects and deployments. Paradoxically, only one in ten IT managers consider it a high priority to invest in emerging technologies.
Lack of resources and time
IT departments will not have many more resources than in 2016 to carry out their projects related to innovation and digital transformation. According to the research firm MSM Research, IT spending by Swiss companies will increase by an average of 1.9% in 2017. And the overwhelming majority of the French-speaking CIOs we surveyed indicated budgets equivalent to those of 2016. In addition, according to Capgemini, spending on updates, upgrades and extensions absorbs an increasing share of budgets at the expense of innovation projects. This is due to the reduction in software release cycles and the fact that digitization increases the number of applications and therefore complexity. "More than ever, CIOs are being asked to continue digitizing their companies. However, a large part of IT budgets is absorbed by the maintenance of daily operations. The balance is not enough to support the design of new business models through innovation, so these expenses are increasingly being taken up by the business lines," explains Srinivas Rao, Vice President at Capgemini Switzerland.
Source: ICT Journal / January 2017 / © Netzmedien AG 2017
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