Most CIOs are cloud-ready, but integration is proving challenging, a survey of CIOs shows.

The pandemic has had a dramatic and lasting impact on the way we work. 70 per cent of CIOs surveyed by Objective reported Covid-19 had accelerated the adoption of new technology, and 65 per cent felt it had changed the way they engaged with their people. There was also a consensus that remote working is here to stay, with the majority of organisations expecting their people to come to the office 2–3 days per week.

In light of these changes, many public sector organisations are making the move to the cloud. And they’re in good company. It’s estimated that over 60 per cent of all corporate data is stored in the cloud in 2022 and this figure is growing at 36 per cent  annually.

Over 95 per cent of CIOs surveyed were either in the cloud or planning to move to the cloud, and there were a number of reasons for this shift. 37 per cent were looking to create business value and savings, while 41 per cent wanted more flexible and agile solutions that were easy to implement and maintain.

Functionality and usability

With more people accessing applications remotely, ease of use has grown in importance. But there was consensus among the CIOs that both functionality and usability were equally important, and they weren’t willing to compromise on either.

Historically, a common way to achieve this balance has been to customise the software to create a “perfect” fit for business requirements. However, this approach is now largely avoided by the CIOs surveyed, due to both initial and ongoing costs, and maintenance overheads.

Integration issues

Integration is another piece of the puzzle that is proving to be challenging. Integration is vital for organisations to get right if they are to fulfil their promise of providing better end-to-end processes and outstanding online services to citizens. But there are many barriers CIOs face in this area including:

• a lack of standardised integration methodology or platform across the organisatio
• legacy on-premise systems that make integration cumbersome and costly
• information silos

This is leading to poor data quality and a lack of control and oversight over their information.

For more about the challenges facing CIOs in the public sector and regulated industries, download our insight paper: How CIOs are Taming the Information Sprawl.