5 Challenges CIOs Are Facing—and How to Solve Them

From getting your arms around all the datayour company owns to getting more bang for your business’s buck, CIOs arefacing a number of pressures and challenges these days—and they’re onlymounting.

I recently sat down with five of the mostrevered IT leaders of the past three decades—Domo Enterprise Advisory Boardmembers Phil Fasano, John Leggate, Tony Scott, Esat Sezer, and Mahvash Yazdi,who possess more than 100 years of combined experience as global CIOs at someof the world’s largest organizations—and not only got their takes on what theysee as the biggest challenges for CIOs, but how they would go about tacklingthem if they were calling the shots.

Challenge#1 - Overcoming Data Distress

Accordingto IDC, the size of the global datasphere (i.e. theamount of data society generates, uses, and retains) will grow from 33zettabytes in 2018 to more than 175 ZB by 2025—a fivefold increase.

That’s a dramatic jump. Unfortunately, many ITleaders are dealing with the situation in a feeble manner, said Phil Fasano.

“Most companies are wallowing in data,thinking they’ve got to create massive, proprietary data projects that aregoing to solve everything,” said the former CIO of AIG and Kaiser Permanente.“Such in-house projects just give you basic insight about the data you own. Youcan get a lot further if you partner.”

Colony American Finance partnered with Domo atthe end of 2015 and is reaping the benefits.

“From a head count perspective, Colony isprobably one-third the size of its closest competitor,” said Matthew March,former CIO of Colony American Finance, “but it does twice as much volume asthat competitor.”

Challenge#2 - Breaking Down Silos

While 97% of organizations are currentlyundertaking—or planning to undertake—digital transformation initiatives,integration challenges are hindering efforts for 84% of organizations.

That was the key finding of a report released earlier this year on the state of IT. And that’s a problem, if you ask Tony Scott.

“You’ve absolutely got to create or adoptsystems that help you comply with the law and still help you get the job donethat you’re trying to do,” said the former CIO of Microsoft, the Walt DisneyCompany, and the U.S. Government.

Scott’s solution?

“I’d look to Domo,” he said, “because withDomo, you don’t have to do a heavy lift and shift of all these legacyapplications to get at the data to create the new business processes and thevisibility you want to have across the organization.”

There isn’t a long waiting period, either.Said Bart Butler, Chief Innovation Office, European Wax Center: “Domo came inand connected to our legacy data system within four or five minutes. We wereoff and running in no time.”

For threemore challenges CIOs are facing—and how to solve them—click here.