CIOs Prioritize Innovation to Improve Digital Customer Connections
October 06, 2021
Share this

The role of the CIO is evolving with an increased focus on unlocking customer connections through service innovation, according to the 2021 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis.


The study, which questions 1000 CIOs from around the world, reveals the shift in the role of the CIO with the majority of CIO respondents stating innovation, operational efficiency, and customer experience as their top priorities.

Over the last 12 months, there has been a notable shift in the defining aspects of the CIO role, with most respondents noting a significant increase in the time they now spend on innovation (79%), strategic planning (77%) and productivity (62%). This is a stark contrast to previous years, where the majority of CIOs reported a lack of time to spend on both innovation and strategic planning.

CIOs are now tasked with revolutionizing business infrastructures to tackle the modern world and increasingly digitally based interactions. Customers now expect to engage with businesses digitally as standard, and as a result companies need to innovate to redefine and elevate their customer interactions to stand out from the competition.

Over the last year, 73% of CIOs state the importance of customer experience has increased and this isn't slowing down any time soon.

Additionally, 4 in 5 (81%) respondents believe that their focus on redefining the customer experience will grow over the next 5 years.

CIOs should innovate to build agile and adaptable infrastructures which unearth hidden insights in the digital customer journey to empower closer customer connections. As IT leaders, they have the technical expertise to interpret customer engagement data and unearth hidden insights to improve the customer experience, optimize operations and achieve their business objectives.

Toby Alcock, CTO of Logicalis says: "Digital experience has become one of, if not the most, important way to reach, connect and communicate with customers in the new digital age. The ability to provide an optimal digital experience will determine the future of an organization. To deliver the digital experience, businesses should overhaul their infrastructure and leverage evolving technologies to interrogate the end-to-end digital customer journey. By being in closer proximity to customers, CIOs can ensure they can keep up with the needs and demands of the modern customer."

Share this

The Latest

May 15, 2024

Businesses are dazzled by the promise of generative AI, as it touts the capability to increase productivity and efficiency, cut costs, and provide competitive advantages. With more and more generative AI options available today, businesses are now investigating how to convert the AI promise into profit. One way businesses are looking to do this is by using AI to improve personalized customer engagement ...

May 14, 2024

In the fast-evolving realm of cloud computing, where innovation collides with fiscal responsibility, the Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report illuminates the challenges and triumphs shaping the digital landscape ... At the forefront of this year's findings is the resounding chorus of organizations grappling with cloud costs ...

May 13, 2024

Government agencies are transforming to improve the digital experience for employees and citizens, allowing them to achieve key goals, including unleashing staff productivity, recruiting and retaining talent in the public sector, and delivering on the mission, according to the Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey from Riverbed ...

May 09, 2024

App sprawl has been a concern for technologists for some time, but it has never presented such a challenge as now. As organizations move to implement generative AI into their applications, it's only going to become more complex ... Observability is a necessary component for understanding the vast amounts of complex data within AI-infused applications, and it must be the centerpiece of an app- and data-centric strategy to truly manage app sprawl ...

May 08, 2024

Fundamentally, investments in digital transformation — often an amorphous budget category for enterprises — have not yielded their anticipated productivity and value ... In the wake of the tsunami of money thrown at digital transformation, most businesses don't actually know what technology they've acquired, or the extent of it, and how it's being used, which is directly tied to how people do their jobs. Now, AI transformation represents the biggest change management challenge organizations will face in the next one to two years ...

May 07, 2024

As businesses focus more and more on uncovering new ways to unlock the value of their data, generative AI (GenAI) is presenting some new opportunities to do so, particularly when it comes to data management and how organizations collect, process, analyze, and derive insights from their assets. In the near future, I expect to see six key ways in which GenAI will reshape our current data management landscape ...

May 06, 2024

The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era. "Data-ready enterprises that connect and unify broad structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure are best positioned to win in the age of AI ...

May 02, 2024

A majority (61%) of organizations are forced to evolve or rethink their data and analytics (D&A) operating model because of the impact of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to a new Gartner survey ...

May 01, 2024

The power of AI, and the increasing importance of GenAI are changing the way people work, teams collaborate, and processes operate ... Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2024 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...

April 30, 2024

IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most ...