New Year’s Resolution for IT leaders

The end of the year is fast approaching and, together with their personal New Year’s resolutions, many CTOs and CIOs are starting to formulate their professional resolutions. Clearly, the IT leadership role has evolved from a support function to a future-leading and chief strategic innovator position. And yet, as much as IT leaders look towards the future, it sometimes seems as if the future is quickly running away from them, with potential innovations developing so quickly that it’s not possible to evaluate them, much less implement them.

For businesses of all sizes and in all industries, evolving to the cloud in 2016 will be critical for both conventional cost reduction and innovational business transformation. IT leaders who move to the cloud will enjoy reduced complexity and increased flexibility. Infrastructure has traditionally been a large fixed cost for the CIO, and it has hampered the flexibility to increase and decrease expenses, which in turn means the flexibility to deploy headcount to true innovation areas that will be crucial for the future of the enterprise.

IT leaders have frequently been faulted for chasing the next shiny object (the “Squirrel!” reaction). But the cloud is here to stay, and cloud computing will help them focus on real opportunities that will drive growth for the company.