What trends will define the actions and spend of the South Africa CIO as they head into 2016? What statistics and numbers will follow their choices and what technology is going to drive their engagements? According to Gartner, digitisation, disruption, platformisation and digital leadership are vital tools to lock into any CIO arsenal and it seems that those in the know are in line with the leading researcher's views. Here are some of the top trends for 2016 as predicted by South African CIOs.
1. Agility is everything
Says Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior Systems Engineering manager at VMWare Southern Africa: "IT agility remains at the top of the list of challenges for CIOs. As the need grows for the faster rollout of customer-centric and business applications, the IT engine needs to be able to support and enable the deployment of these apps. Or be the reason that innovation is stunted."
PriceWaterhouseCoopers agrees. In its latest report that examines building enterprise agility, the organisation is under immense pressure to accurately sense changes in the markets and the 'whims of ever more demanding customers and respond quickly and appropriately'.
"As technology is increasingly user-driven, the IT organisation is expected to be far more agile and responsive than it was before," says Frank Rizzo, Data Analytics leader at KPMG. "This demand for agility is also being viewed as a competitive advantage, which, if not harnessed quickly enough, will lose its edge."
2. Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved beyond being the super-connected and is now being channelled into solutions and use cases that are far more dynamic. According to Nader Henein, BlackBerry Security director: "IoT and mobile technology are creating new ways for businesses to interact with customers and to streamline their processes. We are seeing more focus on the customer experience, enabled by digital touchpoints and rich analytics data for personalisation. With digital technology taking such a central role in business, CIOs have an opportunity to play a more strategic part in the enterprise."
It's everything
3. XaaS
It's the new world of Everything as a Service (XaaS) and everything software-defined will replace the traditional way we consume IT services. This is according to Muggie Van Staden, MD at Obsidian Systems. He believes that 2016 will throw the CIO some significant challenges: "The CIO has to provide IT in this consumption model for the business to consume. The terminology is really around cloud computing and the extensive variety of services and applications that will now be available for users, on-demand and subscription models based on consumption."
4. Skills shortage
Chris Willemse, CEO at DAC Systems, highlights one of the biggest issues facing the CIO in South Africa - skills.
"The skills shortages in niche areas in South Africa are still a major concern," he says. "Technical skills as well as functional skills in the following product lines: Dynamics ERP skills, Dynamics CRM skills, Senior SharePoint skills, Senior PPM skills. This impacts the CIO because if no new blood comes into the market, the existing recourses will just cost more. The challenge for the vendors is to grow skills and to keep costs manageable."
5. Adapt or die
The age-old term has never been truer, with most CIOs saying that any business that cannot shift, change and adapt will not exist in the next ten to 15 years. Market dynamics are too demanding and volatile to expect anything less.
Cybercriminals will see the impact on high-profile targets like Sony...which will drive then to add breach methods to their arsenal of attacks.
Darry O'Brian, Trend Micro
"Most highly respected market experts such as McKinsey and S&P have predicted that the speed of market changes is now doubling and that somewhere around 30 percent of all organisations in a sector will not exist in the next ten years, due mainly to an inability to adapt to market dynamics," says Khutso Jason Dover, director, Product Line Management, Kemp Technologies.
Data-driven disruption
6. Data is king
Content may well be overthrown for now, overtaken in importance by the value of data in building, driving and transforming the business. Companies need to make sense of the data they have and, given the growth of big data, decision-makers are rapidly recognising the importance of extracting its value and using it to drive business. At the recent Gartner Symposium ITxpo, Peter Sondergaard, Gartner Researcher senior VP, said: "Data is inherently dumb. It doesn't do anything unless you know how to use it."
"This is where the algorithm economy comes in," says Warren Olivier, regional manager for Southern Africa at Veeam. "The focus has been on getting systems in place that take care of data storage and its management and with people being connected to the corporate back-end systems using a variety of devices from wherever they are; it makes sense to have the building blocks in place. However, this is no longer good enough. The pressure is on decision-makers to find a balance between managing data, analysing it and shifting strategy to meet the changing demands of the market."
7. Digital disruption
This is probably one of the most exciting and challenging of the predictions for 2016 as digital disruption continues to make itself felt. Organisations that don't prepare for the digital future will likely be crushed by the Godzilla-like digital footprints of those that do.
"This trend is happening in all industries at a pace that is both appealing and challenging for business leaders," says Cathy Smith, GM of Cisco South Africa. "By 2020, Gartner predicts that 75 percent of businesses will be digital businesses, or preparing to become one. As such, 2016 will see many South African businesses take those first steps towards digitisation."
Brandon Meszaros, DSG CIO, agrees: "South African CIOs are faced with increasing pressure to understand the impact of increasingly mobile and digitally empowered consumers and convert this understanding into an integrated customer experience, incorporating greater degrees of control of the value chain and measurement of business outcomes into IT initiatives."
8. Hacktivism
"We will see more hacktivists executing destructive attacks by going after data that can potentially damage their data's integrity," says Darryn O'Brien, country manager at Trend Micro. "Cybercriminals will see the impact of data breaches on high-profile targets like Sony, Ashley Madison and even the Hacking Team, which will drive them to add data breach methods to their arsenal of tactics."
The rise of a job spec allocated exclusively to security such as data protection officer or chief risk officer could well be on the 2016 cards as businesses race to defend and protect against incursion.
On enterprise agility:
* 77% of IT and business decision-makers believe agility is more important than cost savings [http://www.experienceinfosys.com/cloudstudy]
* 81% of business leaders and IT decision-makers either already have, or plan to implement, mission-critical apps in the cloud
* 83% of enterprises are struggling to bring together all cloud services, according to Forrester
On the Internet of Things:
* According to CSG International, 94% of businesses have seen a return on their IoT investments
* The global IoT market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 31.72% from 2014-2019
* Gartner predicts that IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $30 billion in 2020
* IoT spend worldwide will exceed $2.5 million every minute in 2016
On XaaS:
* Relative value of growth (RVG) for tech companies will rely on outpacing competition in rapidly evolving high-growth areas such as XaaS [http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/perspectives/2015-technology-trends]
* 80% of US companies use cloud services now or plan to introduce them, according to McKinsey
* IDC predicts that traditional outsourcing will be replaced by XaaS transformations and driven by cost until 2018
* 90% of enterprise strategies will include significant digital transformation components
On skills shortages:
* 59% of CIOs believe that the technology skills shortage is getting worse [https://www.kpmg.com/ZA/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Management-Consulting/Documents/Harvey_Nash_CIO_Survey_2015_Global.pdf]
* Fastest growing skills demands are big data, analytics, change management and development
On data:
* The IDC predicts that, in the IoT Age, value derived will be based on the successful leverage of data
* 294 billion emails sent every day
* One billion Google searches every day
* Gartner states - big data is useless without algorithms.
On digitisation:
* The Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast 2014-2019 predicts South African mobile data traffic to grow two times faster than fixed IP traffic
* In SA 62% of mobile connections will be smart by 2019
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