Читать книгу The New Normal in IT - Gregory S. Smith - Страница 7

PREFACE

For the past 30 years, I've had the pleasure of working in the IT industry across a variety of sectors (financial services, Big 5 management and IT consulting, U.S. national security/defense, environmental, public policy, education, and healthcare). During my career, some areas of knowledge and experience have become more important in the strategic role as a chief information officer/chief technology officer (CIO/CTO) than others. Until 2020, the information technology (IT) operational and strategic playbooks for various industries were pretty set and focused around deploying applications, knowledge management systems, technology infrastructure via a mix of cloud and on-premises installations, and security – mostly centered around physical office buildings and data centers where most staff worked. As a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic that originated in early 2020, everything IT related has changed and will likely remain different forever. Companies are moving to full or partial remote workers with more tolerance for broader geographical ranges of resources. In addition, they are shedding corporate office locations or at a minimum, reducing the office footprint significantly to reduce costs. Why? Because the pandemic of 2020–2021 showed how valuable information technology can be to an organization and that we have proven that organizations are more productive working remotely away from expensive corporate office buildings.

The role of the CIO/CTO going forward will change globally forever as a result. The purpose of this book is to share with others my experience and predictions alongside other CIOs across a diverse set of sectors (energy, manufacturing, academia, transportation, consumer products, financial services, and nonprofits) regarding the future strategy deployment of technology post Covid-19. I plan to cover three broad areas. First, what the postpandemic new normal looks like for IT leaders regarding resource sourcing, the office of the future and how collaboration tools will continue to accelerate a hybrid office/remote work force across the globe. Second, I will discuss how risk mitigation and specifically disaster recovery testing and planning will adapt to include worst-case scenarios. Third, my CxO (CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO) panel and I will share how today's CIOs are adapting their IT governance approach to meet the new IT normal and how key performance indicators will likely change as a result.

Approach

The Contents takes the reader on a logical path to learning and obtaining the key skills and approaches best-practice IT leaders are adapting as a result of what they've learned from the recent global pandemic. I leverage my own experience, along with a group of CIOs, chief information security officers (CISOs), chief operations officers (COOs), and chief executive officers (CEOs) from a variety of sectors to communicate the best and most helpful approaches used by leading CIOs today. I'll also seek research support from the best IT advisory research firms on the market to support my conclusions and predictions.

Target Audience

The target audience of this text includes IT professionals from middle-management (managers, directors, VPs) to senior management up to and including the roles of the CIO and CTO. As a result, the market opportunity for this book is quite large, given the large-scale audience of middle managers to the top information technology (IT) spot in most organizations – the CIO.

In addition, the audience includes a large number of global undergraduate and graduate technology management or information systems academic programs.

I believe that there is a significant need for a book of this type at this time. First – many organizations that were technically unprepared for the pandemic suffered greatly. This text will serve as a road map for how to move forward with a technology strategy so that prior mistakes are not made twice. Second, I will draw on the expertise of CIOs and other executives across a wide swath of sectors to tell their story on how well they handled the pandemic and what changes they are making going forward. This will reveal the path forward for middle IT management (managers and directors), who I see as a large target market opportunity. Third, since the technology revolution that started in the 1990s through 2019, the world has never seen something as disruptive to companies and organizations as the Covid-19 pandemic. It literally impacted all industrialized and technology advanced nations. This text will provide predictions and strategies based on my experience and my research panel regarding where technology development, adoption, and spending will go post-Covid-19 for one key reason: so organizations across the globe are prepared when another global event happens again, which it will.