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Gartner: CIOs Must Tackle Next Set of Business Challenges from COVID-19

CIOs have increased their organizational credibility during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are more complex challenges that CIOs must tackle during the recovery to sustain their elevated value, according to Gartner, Inc.

A Gartner CIO Research Circle (a Gartner managed panel) survey of 58 CIOs in May 2020 revealed that 43% of respondents said planning for their enterprises’ post-COVID-19 strategy has begun, while 38% were still dealing with the effects, but will turn to recovery soon.

“CIOs, in many organizations, were instrumental in dealing with the initial impact of COVID-19. Enterprises continue to operate with a heavy lift from IT organizations, especially in enabling a newly dispersed workforce to work from home. Consequently, many CIOs have a new opportunity to take a seat at the table when senior leaders decide enterprise strategy and which lines of business to ramp up and which ones to reduce,” said Andy Rowsell-Jones, Distinguished Research VP at Gartner.

The Gartner survey showed that the COVID-19 crisis has improved CIOs’ relationships with business leaders and the benefits flowed both ways. Almost 75% of respondents said they educated CEOs and other senior leaders during the crisis, while two-thirds of CIOs said they gained knowledge of business operations.

“The improved engagement with the CEO stems from business capabilities delivered by IT during the initial COVID-19 response,” said Rowsell-Jones. “For example, 67% of CIOs said they “assumed leadership of high-impact initiatives” during the response. That likely refers to supporting working from home for employees as 70% of CIOs listed support for working from home as their proudest accomplishment in the pandemic response. However, this goodwill with the CEO will fade quickly unless CIOs can extend it by helping the business deliver on other high-impact initiatives required during the recovery.”

Focus on the Next Set of Business Challenges to Sustain Momentum

The COVID-19 pandemic did not trigger a major IT reorganization and may have delayed one that was already underway. Many IT organizations were in the process of moving to a more product-centric delivery model when the pandemic struck and replaced these plans with something much more immediate. However, what worked well during the initial response to the pandemic will not carry the enterprise to success as organizations reset their strategy.

CIOs will have to make substantial changes to help their enterprises achieve their top business objectives during the recovery. The survey showed that CIOs already recognize some of the changes they need to make to the IT organization but may not realize how far they need to take the changes.

The Gartner survey asked respondents about changes in priority they made in response to COVID-19. A large percentage of CIOs did make some things a higher priority, including changing the organizational culture and aligning to business priorities. However, most CIOs who changed priorities did so only to a small degree, just enough to deal with the immediate crisis.

“For the IT organization to play a larger role in developing and executing the business strategy, CIOs will have to make a much larger degree of change in many areas. For example, using cloud services to deploy applications faster to remote workers may represent a significant change in platform for some enterprises, but it remains within the realm of operations,” said Rowsell-Jones. “A business-oriented IT strategy would likely involve the construction of a digital business technology platform — a long and complex undertaking.”

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Gartner: CIOs Must Tackle Next Set of Business Challenges from COVID-19

CIOs have increased their organizational credibility during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are more complex challenges that CIOs must tackle during the recovery to sustain their elevated value, according to Gartner, Inc.

A Gartner CIO Research Circle (a Gartner managed panel) survey of 58 CIOs in May 2020 revealed that 43% of respondents said planning for their enterprises’ post-COVID-19 strategy has begun, while 38% were still dealing with the effects, but will turn to recovery soon.

“CIOs, in many organizations, were instrumental in dealing with the initial impact of COVID-19. Enterprises continue to operate with a heavy lift from IT organizations, especially in enabling a newly dispersed workforce to work from home. Consequently, many CIOs have a new opportunity to take a seat at the table when senior leaders decide enterprise strategy and which lines of business to ramp up and which ones to reduce,” said Andy Rowsell-Jones, Distinguished Research VP at Gartner.

The Gartner survey showed that the COVID-19 crisis has improved CIOs’ relationships with business leaders and the benefits flowed both ways. Almost 75% of respondents said they educated CEOs and other senior leaders during the crisis, while two-thirds of CIOs said they gained knowledge of business operations.

“The improved engagement with the CEO stems from business capabilities delivered by IT during the initial COVID-19 response,” said Rowsell-Jones. “For example, 67% of CIOs said they “assumed leadership of high-impact initiatives” during the response. That likely refers to supporting working from home for employees as 70% of CIOs listed support for working from home as their proudest accomplishment in the pandemic response. However, this goodwill with the CEO will fade quickly unless CIOs can extend it by helping the business deliver on other high-impact initiatives required during the recovery.”

Focus on the Next Set of Business Challenges to Sustain Momentum

The COVID-19 pandemic did not trigger a major IT reorganization and may have delayed one that was already underway. Many IT organizations were in the process of moving to a more product-centric delivery model when the pandemic struck and replaced these plans with something much more immediate. However, what worked well during the initial response to the pandemic will not carry the enterprise to success as organizations reset their strategy.

CIOs will have to make substantial changes to help their enterprises achieve their top business objectives during the recovery. The survey showed that CIOs already recognize some of the changes they need to make to the IT organization but may not realize how far they need to take the changes.

The Gartner survey asked respondents about changes in priority they made in response to COVID-19. A large percentage of CIOs did make some things a higher priority, including changing the organizational culture and aligning to business priorities. However, most CIOs who changed priorities did so only to a small degree, just enough to deal with the immediate crisis.

“For the IT organization to play a larger role in developing and executing the business strategy, CIOs will have to make a much larger degree of change in many areas. For example, using cloud services to deploy applications faster to remote workers may represent a significant change in platform for some enterprises, but it remains within the realm of operations,” said Rowsell-Jones. “A business-oriented IT strategy would likely involve the construction of a digital business technology platform — a long and complex undertaking.”

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The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...