CIOs defend the customer experience

CIOs are at the heart of competitive business strategies. Competitive pressure is increasing.

Consumers are increasingly demanding and expect exemplary digital journeys. Otherwise, you’ll have to go elsewhere, and not necessarily to big companies.

Just look at the insolent growth of startups that are tackling historical markets such as luncheon vouchers(Lunchr vs. Endered) or mutual health insurance(Alan vs. the rest of the world). Industries considered impregnable in all business schools (see Porter’s Forces), they are nevertheless being challenged by simpler, more digital, more efficient offers.

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CIOs optimize their organization through automation

But the task is even greater. Organizations must also change the way they work and optimize internal operations. Do more with less (or even less in some cases). This search for cost reduction (or cost control more precisely) is the very reason for the(crazy?) growth of the automation market (RPA / AI / chatbots,…) in recent months.

In recent years, CIOs have begun to lay the technological foundations for this digital revolution:

• development of cloud uses
• DevOps
• Application APIs
• RPP
• Cognitive tools (computer vision, NLP,…)

We are fortunate to see this gradual implementation among our customers and prospects. For the most advanced, 2020 will be the year when the fruits of these investments will start to be felt in a concrete way.

According to Forrester’s predictions for 2020, CIOs will seek to automate 10% of their most repetitive and standardized IT tasks. In particular, thanks to RPA robots, IT support chatbots, or new generation cloud applications.

But as we see with our clients, automation does not mean redundancy. This is never the case at the moment. Instead, CIOs are looking for time to free up from their overworked teams. The question will be how to best employ my teams who now have more time. But this transition is not so simple because the skills needed are constantly changing. An IT support manager, used to writing documentation and managing tickets in ITSM tools, will now have to learn how to manage APIs, chatbots or RPA.

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Thinking about the next move: HR strategy for CIOs

The main challenge for CIOs in 2020 will therefore be to think about the next move. How to make sure that my teams, to whom I have freed up time, are trained to be effective as quickly as possible on higher value-added tasks (AMOA, N2-N3 support, management of bots / chatbots, DevOps, etc.).

The most far-sighted CIOs will therefore have to implement an HR strategy to manage their teams and their skills:

1. What are the skills of tomorrow that I need the most?
2. What are the current skills of my teams that I am freeing up time for?
3. What skills are my teams missing to get where I want them to go?
4. Explain and propose this change to my teams: and therefore manage misunderstandings or reluctance
5. To set up the rise in competence of my teams: to find the trainings, etc…

So 2020 is likely to be an exciting year as we finally enter the management of the concrete effects of the digital revolution. We are currently in the process of understanding, experimenting and industrializing automation solutions (and all the technologies involved). It is now time to think about the impact on the way we work.