As I meet with customers and prospects across the nation, it is incredibly valuable the insights I receive from CEOs, CIOs and CTOs, and learn from them what keeps them up at night.

Whether talking to a customer in New Your or in Dallas, all share concerns about the future & the role emerging technologies will play in transforming their business. This is directly related to the changing role of the CIO – how they are now seen as not only the person who is keeping the technology running, but as a key player in deciphering emerging technologies & identifying which innovation projects will help propel them forward – so they can disrupt before being disrupted.
And the CIOs know that technology is a moving target.

As an example, building modern applications typically involves many different coding languages and development frameworks. Just look at the sheer number of JavaScript-based frameworks that are available—there are well over 80 now—each of which is evolving independently, resulting in potential compatibility issues. Plus, the framework you select today could fall out of favor tomorrow. For example, AngularJS, ReactJS, and Backbone are currently hot, but will they be prevalent in a year or two? How a CIO will disrupt before being disrupted in situations like that? The answer is anyone’s guess. The bottom line is, building future-proof applications is no small feat.

CIOs are facing multiple challenges which is keeping them up at night. Some IT organizations have more work than their IT teams can deliver. When I am talking to CIOs, CTOs, they are reporting to have a significant backlog of mobile apps. In some cases, they had dozen apps or more waiting to be developed. And we know what that means – business waiting for solutions as customers having a not too pleasant experience.

As a matter of fact, when talking to C-execs they share the need to keep the lights on activities that consume substantial portion of their budget with much less to innovate or finding solutions that could help them to disrupt and not being disrupted.

An Inflexible back-office system not only use up too many resources and too much budget, but they’re also hard to integrate or adapt in the ways needed to support new digital initiatives. So, a slow development method associated with legacy systems make a tough situation worse.

Can a CIO or CTO disrupt in this environment? Probably not and the results would someone disrupting the business putting in risk its existence.

New Technologies are the foundation of the digital initiatives to disrupt other business. However digital initiatives require specific technical skills. Since many organizations don’t
have them, their choices are to invest heavily in training, recruit necessary skills, or plug gaps with outsourcing. Unfortunately, with developers costing a lot, these options are expensive, time consuming, or both.

The Digital transformation is hard because it involves genuine
innovation and a different mindset. Processes, business models, service offerings are all likely to be new. Adoption by customers and partners is unpredictable. Simply put, this is a million miles from the comparative safety of incremental and linear business improvement. Embracing such uncertainty
is often hard for IT organizations. New methods are needed throughout the entire development
lifecycle. Risk-averse, business-case prioritization is out.
However, a lot of companies are still behind and feels new technologies are a threat, and C-execs are missing the biggest opportunity to disrupt business and exceed companies results with budget optimization, right allocation of resources, agility and flexibility on top of time to market with innovation.

During my conversation with C-execs in several areas of the industry I found that:

• 50% of business leaders don’t think automated systems will free-up their; they feel this will threat their organizations
• Almost 60% doesn’t agree to offload automations tasks to machine with concern about losing the control of the operation. They will keep doing tasks that could easily be automated and will continue to lack time for higher order pursuits that focus on creativity, education and strategy.

Also, when talking to the C-execs most understand the needs to lead with the technology. And no one in any given organization knows as much about technology as the CIO. It is through innovative use of technology, namely software, that start-ups are disrupting established companies. A technologist to the bone, the CIO not only knows which technologies can be used to attack the company’s position but can also play a leadership role in identifying how the company can use technology to pre-empt disruption or move the goalposts to their advantage.
There is a tendency when talking technology to be totally binary or metrics focused, but a key success factor in any organization’s transformation is their people.

The CIO needs to balance driving change at the right speed, without going too fast and losing valuable resources along the way. The CIO needs to set the tone and clearly explain why change is necessary and what it will mean to the organization. In my conversation what I got from those that successfully implemented innovative technologies to drive digital transformation are the ones that secure employee buy-in on a company’s digital transformation vision and values.
And the last piece here to decide to the right tools to manage the digital transformation.

And here it is Genexus.  We’ve had the privilege of working with clients and developers around the world for over 30 years. Our technologies empower the enterprise to do more than ever before.
Genexus was the first company to release the first intelligent tool for creating and maintaining software, automatically.
We do this by automating everything that can be automated so that people can be free to create (not code) software solutions easily and quickly. Simply put, our mission is to help people create better applications, the easiest way possible, and we have the best team to help customers do this.

To know more about Genexus please visit www.genexususa.com