10. Infrastructure
Despite their increasingly strategic role within their organizations, CIOs remain keenly attentive to the technical components of their job as they continue to modernize, shed technical debt, and optimize their environments.
It’s not easy: According to the State of the CIO, 75% of CIOs say it is challenging to find the right balance between business innovation and operational excellence.
“This is something that’s on my plate every single year: the infrastructure side of the house,” Phillips says, adding that he is reviewing capacity and working to ensure the technical environment will scale alongside the company as it grows. “That’s a constant planning cycle, and it requires knowing what buttons we are going to press before they’re needed.”
Basu, too, is readying his company’s infrastructure to meet current and future needs, citing as an example a current modernization project featuring the move to a new cloud-based ERP platform as well as ongoing digitalization initiatives.
“We want to be on a modern platform and doing more for our money,” he says about the move, noting that the projects will bring cost savings and efficiencies and add new digital capabilities. “For us, as a growing company, we want to be continuously modernizing so we’re keeping up.”
