How Can Intelligent Automation and Agility Influence the CIO's Agenda?
Tags: ai, automation
Published: 2022-10-18 06:59:09


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Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and their teams are critical in building digital workforces needed to drive digital transformation. 

With companies adopting intelligent automation-first business strategies, CIOs find themselves in advanced functions that differ from previous ones.

Initially, the CIO's agenda was to optimize the costs of business processes and the ability to speed. However, in recent times, their responsibility has shifted to creating business differentiation. 

[Intelligent automation (IA)](https://sageitinc.com/services/intelligent-automation) and agility have played a key role in influencing the CIO's agenda in an organization. Keep reading to find out how.

## What Led to the Change of CIO's Agenda in IT-Powered Enterprises?
 
In the early phases of commercial information technology (IT), companies were driven by multiple functional areas. As a result, they would automate repeatable tasks in one-off functional areas, such as development, testing, or design. However, automating specific functional areas led to siloed automation, delayed success, and technical debt. These shortcomings continued haunting firms' business process efficiency. 

## Today and Future
As initially stated, the objectives of CIOs shifted to creating business differentiation capabilities as new technologies were born. To enhance the agility of current IT architectures, chief information officers now concentrate on creating loosely coupled IT infrastructure. They use componentized microservices technique that provides greater functional availability and elasticity – all delivered through the cloud. 

These changes directly optimize business results and agility, enhancing customer experience. For instance, e-commerce merchants componentize their business functionalities and scale their IT system architecture to efficiently handle seasonal surges in their website traffic, like Christmas and Black Fridays.

## A Guide to How Intelligent Automation Transforms CIO's Agenda
According to a CIO study, the budget growth for IT is anticipated to increase over time. The study showed that 59% (in 2022) of CIOs expect an increase in IT expenditure compared to 49% in 2021. Ironically, pundits predicted that CIOs would slowly lose their impact in the executive suit a few years ago. However, the opposite happened. 

But how did CIO's role change to actually transform organizations digitally through fostering agility and intelligent automation? Keep reading to discover more. 

### At the Core of Transformation
  
Currently, CIOs find themselves at the epicenter of crucial corporate decisions. An Adobe survey discovered that nine out of ten chief information officers are expected to take the role of transforming their organizations digitally in the modern era. 

This corporate control redistribution is highly supported by other top-ranking business executives. Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) nominated CIOs, and IT heads more often than different senior positions. This trend has become the norm because they intend to accelerate the implementation of automation in all relevant business areas. In fact, digital project acceleration is among CIOs' top priorities. 

According to Gartner, chief information officers should focus on discovering the why or assess what automation provides to their company. Instead of stating things like "we shall automate Z," they should break down and quantify things like "we should be more efficient with Y so that we achieve Z."

Since CIOs are at the heart of digital transformation, reframing things in a way that creates a direction of action. Also, it will help them factor in various aspects like challenges, time, and effort saved through taking the specified actions. Doing so makes them focus on value.

### A Brand-New Focus on the Current Workforce
Workforce modification is crucial to help [CIOs incorporate intelligent automation](https://www.automationanywhere.com/company/blog/rpa-thought-leadership/how-cios-can-transform-organizations-with-automation) and achieve agility through digital transformation. However, skilled tech experts in intelligent automation are scarce, limiting organizations' and CIOs' ability to achieve true transformation. As a result, CIOs and respective companies focus on retraining valuable tech employees to help them drive digital change. 
Also, the workforce culture must align with the company's digital transformation goals. Workers should be able to co-create and co-innovate with fresh thinking around tech agility, intelligent automation, and IT/business collaboration.

### Promoting the Co-Innovation Culture

The CIOs are the brains of the whole [intelligent automation and digital transformation](https://www.ssctech.com/blog/digital-transformation-vs-intelligent-automation-why-its-an-and-not-an-or-1) idea. They promote the agile architecture and ensure it aligns with the company's intended business goals. By fostering a culture of co-innovation, they can help improve IT agility and demystify technology's untapped potential for the organization. 

When tech leaders, such as the CIO, understand the company's context and buyer's purchase culture, it drives innovation to whole-new levels. Co-innovation driven by intelligent automation can facilitate brand differentiation. This is because it extends the role of each company, producing a new niche of services and goods depending upon a unique value proposition. 

## Why Do Intelligent Automation and Agility Matter?
Organizations need an end-to-end automated solution to help them enhance their agility, boost productivity, and improve customer experience. This is because the current business environment is highly volatile. Therefore, all decisions should be informed to avoid costly errors and losses. CIOs need to ensure IA and agility work out well because of many reasons, including:

### Improved Decision-Making
IA is crucial in enhancing a company's decisions. Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, IA provides previous data-centered judgments, helping organizations find improvement areas. As a result, it optimizes their choices. 

### Increased Business Process Efficiency
Intelligent automation enables businesses to automate and streamline various functions while maintaining high quality and enhancing transparency. It allows companies to measure, monitor, and audit process execution. What's more, it suggests ways to improve, fostering continuous learning and improvement in the organization. 

### Improved Regulatory Compliance
The last thing an enterprise wants is to have regulatory agencies breathing down its neck due to compliance issues. The actions by these bodies are devastating and can even lead to the total closure of the company. However, the issue of compliance is usually never easy, especially when a company relies on manual processes. 

Fortunately, CIOs can save the company from all these struggles by implementing IA. IA streamlines compliance by automating business regulations and rules, like document disposition and record retention. 

## Final Thought
Intelligent automation and agility can significantly influence the CIO's agenda. From boosting a company's ability to speed up and optimizing costs, CIO's role has changed to building business differentiation, thanks to IA. CIOs have become the center of the IA transformation. As a result, they are more involved in molding the workforce and promoting co-innovative solutions across the organizations. 

Do you think there are more ways intelligent automation and agility have/will influence CIO's agenda? Let me know in the comments.