IT's New Window of Opportunity to Tackle These Top Priorities

 The Covid-19 pandemic has created a plethora of issues for business but it has also opened the door for new initiatives specifically with how the business world views IT. Before the pandemic, many people in IT felt that they had to push the benefits of IT on business as many managers and executives were hesitant to adopt new practices. However, the sudden shift to distance working because of the pandemic greatly changed businesses' perception of IT and now there is a strong demand for IT to meet new business needs. This article surveyed 300 CIOs and IT leaders from top organizations and looked to find what they thought the most important areas of IT growth will be in the upcoming years. 

Not surprisingly the top of the list started with security. This is an obvious one because no business will entrust IT to handle a greater amount of responsibilities if they cannot trust the security of their data. However, the pandemic presented new issues as many employees are working from home thus posing the new problem of having to send data from secure corporate servers to less secure home networks. If business continues to promote work-from-home even in a post-pandemic world they will have to make sure data security remains even with the distribution across a wide arrange of networks.  

During the pandemic, IT played a heroic role by enabling distance working and automating processes to promote social distancing. This shows the potential of what IT can be, and should be used as a case example to help promote IT not as a threat but as a partner supporting human jobs. This article however asserts that IT now has the potential to step in a play an advisory role in business and I believe this assumption may foster negative outcomes. While IT provides a vital function of analyzing data and even has the power to provide predictive statistics, I believe human discernment is necessary for the best decision-making. This is because IT is made by human algorithms which have inherent flaws in them because this field is still developing.  IT is only as smart as people make it and therefore should be viewed not as the bottom line when it comes to decision making but instead as a tool in the decision-making process. 

One of the points of focus on the list was for IT to provide a customer-focused experience, however, I believe this is the weakest point of IT. There is something inherently different about an interaction with another person versus with IT.  IT chatboxes may provide adequate customer experience for simple problems, it doesn't deliver the in-depth interaction that consumers look for in certain business dealings. IT can be an extremely powerful tool to assist people in performing their jobs better however I still believe IT has a long way to go before it starts to replace human roles.