FEATURE: INVESTMENTS

CIOs are under increasing pressure to embrace AI-driven innovation without compromising security, stability or cost-efficiency. Industry experts share practical strategies for balancing transformative technology investments with enterprise resilience in today’ s data-driven landscape.

Scott Wheeler, Cloud Practice Lead, Asperitas

CIOs have always faced pressure to deliver transformative change while maintaining operational stability in their IT environments. With the recent explosive growth of AI, the CIO faces a daunting challenge.

Objectives, Not Technology Trends

Technology should always support a defined business objective. Whether it’ s improving customer engagement, streamlining operations or developing new products and services, it’ s essential to align technology initiatives with business outcomes.

Integrate AI into their organizations to drive transformative change while ensuring resilience and protecting the company’ s data.

Unfortunately, innovation requires risk-taking and experimentation, which is opposed to operational stability, which requires process, discipline and oversight.

The CIO who can find the right balance between these opposing forces will be wildly successful and provide tremendous value to their organization. The question is how to achieve that balance and implementing the following five areas will provide CIOs with the necessary guidance:

The following are essential questions to ask before launching any IT project:

• What business challenge are we solving?

• What impact will this have on our customers, employees or partners?

• Can we measure success in meaningful terms?

Prioritize Resilience

Although everyone will always strive to achieve the maximum resilience possible for their project, this is often not a cost-effective or practical approach. Every IT initiative should understand the organization’ s risk

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