APC Forum: Insights From The Top - Interviews With Two Prominent CIOs

Gauthier: Many challenges face IT executives, so I am not sure if one is necessarily the “biggest.” But definitely one of the biggest challenges today relates to the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, be it with IT professionals, with senior management in one’s organization or with one’s clients. We have come a long way as IT executives in developing the ability to communicate effectively the value of our work. As a result, I believe that our clients have become more technology-savvy and better understand the impact technology can and will have on their environment. In many ways, our challenge is now to find ways to listen better and, in doing so, clearly understand not only the needs of our business users but also the continual pressures to change that they face in order to be competitive and remain relevant. One additional challenge is to either contain or cut costs, especially as the number of services and solutions being offered rises and budgets are either static or being reduced. Thus the CIO faces the challenge of having to generate savings that can be used to finance the growth that is being experienced in other unfunded (or underfunded) areas. Finally, the CIO must manage expectations around the adoption of consumer technologies for enterprise grade work. For example, the use of Dropbox, uShare, and similar services poses both a risk from a security point of view, but also a challenge in managing expectations around time-to-solution for IT services and solutions delivered by the IT department.