Digital business has changed mindset for over three quarters of CIOs in Africa, Gartner survey
Digital business has created a change-ready mindset for 77 percent of CIO survey respondents in Africa, according to Gartner, Inc.’s annual CIO survey.
The survey showed that 50 percent of CIO respondents in Africa are responsible for the digital transformation strategy of their organization, and 43 percent are in charge of innovation.
"CIOs in Africa are fully embracing and capitalizing on digital business," said Tomas Nielsen, research director at Gartner. "Among respondents from Africa, on average, 29 percent of organizations’ processes have been optimized through digital means. As a result, their role is moving to non-IT responsibilities, forcing them to reimagine their role within the organization."
Gartner analysts presented these findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place in Cape Town through Thursday. The 2017 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey gathered data from 3,160 CIO respondents in 98 countries and all major industries, representing approximately $13 trillion in revenue/public-sector budgets and $277 billion in IT spending. Sixty-six CIOs from Africa were surveyed, representing $3 billion in IT spending.
CIO respondents in Africa have made significant inroads in their digital journey. The survey showed that 45 percent of CIOs in Africa are either designing or delivering their digital initiative, while 13 percent moved beyond delivery into scaling and harvesting on their digital initiatives.
However, the majority of CIO respondents in Africa remain in the initial stages of their digital journey – and for these CIOs, the biggest barrier is the organization’s culture. "Nearly half of all CIOs said that culture is the biggest barrier that prevents them from scaling their digital business transformation," said Mr. Nielsen. "Their second highest challenge is shortage of resources." This means that CIOs in Africa need to embrace a broader role beyond technology, and hone their change management and transformational leadership skills to succeed in their digital transformation journey.
"Digital business is clearly taking center stage among the IT department," said Mr. Nielsen. "It is also eroding the barriers to change and increasing the adoption of new technologies and trends in Africa."
As such digital business is not only driving the need of new roles in IT, such as API product managers, chief analytics officers, user experience designers and cloud architects, but for CIOs in Africa another critical investment area is cybersecurity.
The survey found that 36 percent of CIOs in Africa have already invested and deployed a digital security solution and an additional 30 percent are already actively experimenting with digital security. Twenty-nine per cent of CIO respondents in Africa who are in short-term planning or already invested in digital security said it will necessitate the most new skills to be added to the IT department by the time the solution is operational.
"Following the recent cyberattacks, it is not surprising that cybersecurity investments take center stage in Africa," said Mr. Nielsen. Ninety-six percent of respondents believe that cybersecurity threats will increase in the next three years. Increased focus and need for cybersecurity has essentially become the unavoidable consequence of the recent years of growth in cyberattacks. "CIOs should pay increased attention to this space, as it has direct attention from both corporate executives and external board members," added Mr. Nielsen.
The Internet of Things (IoT) was ranked as the second highest investment in digital technologies by CIO respondents in Africa. The survey found that 11 percent of CIOs in Africa have already invested and deployed IoT, 17 percent are actively experimenting with it, and 25 percent have medium or long-term planning for IoT. "Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is also growing with most respondents indicating AI is either on their radar or a medium to long-term plan for 38 and 27 percent of CIOs in Africa, respectively, with only 2 percent having deployed AI," said Mr. Nielsen.
Digital change is causing the role of the CIO to evolve. Respondents reported that they were spending 38 percent of their time with the executive leadership team – up 8 percentage points from three years ago. CIOs are increasingly involved in traditional business tasks such as cost optimization, building business agility, and developing business strategy and planning. In addition, CIOs are increasingly being assessed on business-focused metrics as well as IT-performance metrics.
"The financial outlook for IT in Africa looks promising as there will be more money allocated to IT in 2018," said Mr. Nielsen. CIOs in Africa expect their enterprise IT budget to increase 3.1 percent, on average in 2018. This is up from an average of 2.5 percent last year. CIOs in Africa expect to spend the highest amount of new or additional funding in 2018 on business intelligence and analytics (16 percent of respondents), cybersecurity (16 percent of respondents) and digitalization (15 percent of respondents), while 40 percent reported decreasing their spending on data centers.
"The key is to increase investment in technologies that help organizations reach their business objectives. CIOs should align their priorities with the priorities of their C-level partners. This requires that they know what those priorities are," concluded Mr. Nielsen.
