Every new year brings with it unique IT challenges and opportunities. Brainstorm spoke to three CIOs about what will be drawing their focus in 2014.
The IT industry is still feeling the ripples of the global economic downturn, and CIOs are now more cost-conscious than ever. While the cloud has broadly offered a workable solution for many of the costs associated with IT, it was refreshing to see that the CIOs interviewed are also focusing on innovation and growth in the year ahead.
Growing solutions and talent
"The Paycorp Group is in the payment space, so our biggest priority is looking for market segments to provide to," says Herman Schouwink, IT executive at Paycorp Holdings. "In the IT space, we focus on identifying or developing products that are client-facing and enhance our ability to deliver."
He says that mobile point of sale (POS) is a growing area, so Paycorp has been adding additional features and functionality to its product called ZipZap, which enables users to accept payments on their cellphones.
"Furthermore, as we're a growing business, we've gone through a period of infrastructure renewal and capacity upgrades over the last year or two in preparation for this growth phase."
He says now that the infrastructure is in place, the company is going to 'sweat those assets', which should put the organisation in good stead to provide the underlying infrastructure for business growth.
At the same time, he says there are concerns around the increase in cybercrime, especially in the payment area, so focusing on the best solutions for these threats is also a priority area for IT in his space.
Another challenge facing the IT industry at large, but specifically the payment space, is the shortage of IT skills. "We've been looking at creating a body of knowledge, an incubator of talent in the payment space. We're talking to industry payers about it, and will probably bring it into being in the first half of next year," says Schouwink.
IT for all
Andile Swartbooi, CIO of the University of the Johannesburg (UJ), says that with the influx each year of thousands of students that hail from different educational and social backgrounds, one of his biggest priorities is using technology to enhance the first-year experience.
"One thing that is common among all these students is an expectation for an environment that mimics their digital lives - that of being constantly connected and communicating with peers across the table and across the world."
The main issues IT organisations are focusing on are data convergence of information assets, and then putting them into the cloud wherever possible.
Chandima Miyanadeniya, Aon South Africa
He says UJ realised some time ago that attempting to capture the attention of 'Generation Next' using old-style methods was a futile exercise, so they initiated a digital transformation that saw all libraries, first-year lecture venues, student centres, student residences and open areas becoming fully WiFi-enabled.
"This digital transformation has culminated in UJ taking a bold step in announcing 2014 as the year in which mobile technology-assisted learning will be introduced in all first-year programmes," Swartbooi says. "This implies a substantial increase in the number of mobile devices active on our network and the criticality of ensuring uptime at all times."
Part of the university's philosophy is to ensure that the benefits of modern technology are not limited to a few, so free tablets will be offered to deserving students. And a BYOD policy is aimed at all other students, making the need for automated configuration and self-service essential to limit bottlenecks caused by inadequate support staff.
"The challenge for IT is to ensure the availability of support to both students and academic staff at all times, while maintaining a close eye on the utilisation of such resources as internet bandwidth, server infrastructure and storage."
While the current focus is on first-year students, the university plans to increase the roll-out each year, ultimately extending it to the rest of the student community in its entirety.
Convergence and the cloud
The biggest trends in the IT space over the past few years - and continuing into the future - are convergence strategies and movement towards cloud computing and converged communications.
"On information asset convergence, IT organisations are focusing on cloud transitions," says Chandima Miyanadeniya, the CIO of Aon South Africa, a provider of insurance, risk management and human resource solutions.
He says that for organisations, investing in their own infrastructure and datacentres is becoming increasingly expensive. "By buying into hosted solutions in datacentres that are already provisioned for, IT organisations can provide quick and cost-effective solutions to the corporate. It then becomes only a matter of getting high-speed links into the hosted facility and this is possible with South Africa's current fibre backbones."
As IT refresh cycles come up, he believes that more and more organisations will move into hosted datacentres because of the huge costs involved in revamping internally owned datacentres. "When internally owned base infrastructure depreciates, and capital is required to refresh it, organisations will be looking towards the cloud to give quick and affordable relief on asset replacement costs," he says.
"On converged communications , service providers are giving offers that allow companies to converge their fixed and mobile telecommunication footprints with their data communication footprints. This will be taken up more and more in the industry due to the huge savings that can be achieved by doing this."
He adds that cost-effective remote access solutions through mobile devices are an area of increased focus. "We've come quite far in these areas, driven by the sheer need to reduce costs and create flexibility. We've seen that companies are doing this more and more as we all become more cost-conscious."
First published in the February 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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