Dive Brief:
- As companies responded to the challenges of the pandemic, two-thirds of CIOs "assumed leadership of high-impact initiatives," according to a Gartner survey. The analyst firm conducted a managed panel survey of 58 CIOs in May.
- For 70% of CIOs, enabling companywide pivots to remote work was listed as their proudest accomplishment within the response to the pandemic.
- Post-COVID-19 strategy planning has begun at 43% of companies, while 38% of CIOs said their organizations continue to grapple with the effects of the pandemic, and plan to turn to recovery soon.
Dive Insight:
Inside the leadership suite at companies navigating the coronavirus crisis, CIOs helped steer urgent decisions together with other C-suite members.
In the process, CIO relationships with business leaders improved, Gartner data shows. Three-quarters of CIOs educated CEOs and other senior leaders during the crisis, and another two-thirds of CIOs gained insight into business operations in the process.
The pandemic accelerated a trend that gained momentum throughout the past decade. CIOs began to change the narrative around enterprise technology: going from cost center to operations-enabler.
In the pandemic, CIOs made sustaining operations possible, guiding organizational data and software strategies to enable efficiency in uncharted territory. But the clout CIOs gained within the C-suite "will fade quickly unless CIOs can extend it by helping the business deliver on other high-impact initiatives required during the recovery," said Andy Rowsell-Jones, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, in a press release.
To expand the IT organization's scope of influence, CIOs will have to "make a much larger degree of change in many areas," going beyond operational upgrades such as using cloud to speed up application deployment.
"A business-oriented IT strategy would likely involve the construction of a digital business technology platform — a long and complex undertaking," said Rowsell-Jones.
