Our CIO and IT Leadership Survey 2021 shows that while many organisations met the unexpected challenges posed by 2020 successfully, nearly eight in ten (78%) adopted quick fixes during the year that may not deliver hoped-for returns on that investment in future.

As a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic, organisations were catapulted into urgent activity, reprioritising and accelerating programmes that would safeguard revenues, whether by improving customer experience or operations and optimising costs, or halting and delaying other activities. Over 50% of respondent organisations told us they had moved their entire operation to digital during the pandemic.

Organisations forced to support staff working from home had to re-examine their security  procedures – this was key for over half of respondents in the survey. Forty-four percent of respondents confirm they were struggling with governance constraints; 37% business risk aversion; 32% employee education; and 22% with resistance to change at board level.

Fifty per cent of respondents cited the cost of the changes required to be their biggest challenge, followed by delivery of bandwidth (42%), integration difficulties (41%) and lack of skills and expertise (37%).

Organisations and their leadership teams should be lauded for their tactical choices and successes in such rapid timeframes. After all, even before the pandemic, IT leaders and their departments often struggled to get to grips with strategic change, as the 2019 edition of our annual survey showed.

 

Costs playing out post-pandemic

However, unsurprisingly, there were also post-implementation challenges when it came to the solutions used to shore up business operations – partly due of course to the unusual speed with which decisions had to be made, not only to counter-balance risk, but simply to ensure business continuity.

More than half (53%) of the respondents to our survey, for example, admitted experiencing negative process impacts, and nearly half (45%) reported increased operating costs (45%) as a result of the changes implemented to deal with the pandemic. These data points underline that great foundations for a profitable future typically need to be laid with care, and this can take time.

Echoing this understanding, nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents agreed that re-scoping, undoing projects, renegotiating and postponing or extending timeframes for contracts and redeploying resources will likely cause ongoing business impacts. At Coeus, in many instances, we expect the costs of all this reorganisation to be significant.,.

Meanwhile, two in five (40%) respondent organisations told us that customer and user perceptions were also adversely affected as the organisation tackled uncertainty and internal changes.

A company which can quickly mitigate uncertainty is in a strong position to communicate unambiguously to customers and users, strengthening its brand. This suggests that for many organisations, there is little time to waste when it comes to moving beyond last year’s quick fixes to prepare more comprehensively for growth as we emerge from the pandemic.

Organisations which remain wary of investment – delaying action – run a high risk of falling behind their competitors, as well as customer requirements, when economies begin once more to power ahead. Instead of standing still, they’re effectively going backwards as others advance.

What this is all about, of course, is discovering the right choices well ahead of time, which means collecting the right data, making it usable, turning into insights, and then acting on those learnings.

This remains true whatever field or sector an organisation is in. Data is increasingly critical to progress and innovation across every industry sector and vertical, partly because of the digital transformation imperative – this was so before the pandemic that massively disrupted organisational plans and performance worldwide, and is likely to be the case in future too.

Yet it’s just not possible for most organisations to simply throw money at these challenges and potential solutions.

 

The road to resilience

The route to solving challenges such as the expansion of management complexity due to remote working and distributed teams, or to increase resilience and operational stability, very often entails expanding and improving organisational access to, and use of data.

At the same time, management at all levels continues to work within cost constraints. Twenty-nine percent of CIOs across all sectors tell us they are expecting their IT budgets to remain untouched. Fewer than one in four (22%) say their allowable spend on tech is set to increase.

These effects too can often be mitigated via data technologies that enable organisations to pinpoint areas of weakness and strength in order to maximise the use of scarce resources – whether that’s staff time or technology spend.

There can be a role for skilled consultancy in all this – identifying the investments and strategies that will deliver the greatest ROI for a specific organisation. One thing is certain: the faster an organisation can adapt to new dynamics in the market, the better placed it will be for revenues that deliver profit and sustainability down the track.