The CIO’s Perspective: Digital Business Priorities

In Evanta’s 2022 Leadership Perspective Survey (LPS), CIOs candidly shared their top priorities, challenges, goals, and upcoming planned investments. The results from hundreds of top-level executives surveyed indicate that they are leveraging their digital business priorities to expand their digital business, improve customer and business outcomes, and improve their processes and efficiencies.

Surveyed Evanta executives again ranked digital business priorities 3rd in importance in 2022 with 51% of respondents listing it as a top priority for the upcoming year, an increase of 6% over 2021. It’s clear that this topic isn’t going anywhere and will be a critical area for executives for the foreseeable future.

CIOs in the Evanta community say that they feel a disconnect from their departments and the rest of the business, “The CEO doesn’t know what we do. The board doesn’t have a consistent view of what digital is.” Additionally, CIOs are struggling with “how to move forward from using digital services internally to selling these services on the market” and “the chaos of transformation,” as well as how difficult it is “to change quickly and move towards an agile way of thinking, which is essential for digital transformation.”

Within each priority, Evanta teams are able to dig a bit deeper into the top-rated goals and challenges executives report regarding their digital business priorities. In addition to increasing relevancy and improving the customer experience, these are their most-cited goals:

Over the course of many conversations, CIOs have also enumerated a host of challenges that impede progress in this area — from the ever-present issues of competing priorities and organizational and technical resource capacity to data availability and complexity and challenges with software partners. These are the most-cited obstacles to their digital business priorities that CIOs reported this year:

How does this translate into the bottom line? As ever, executives are using their budgets wisely and investing or planning to invest in their digital business priorities heavily in the coming year.  

69% of surveyed CIOs reported an expected increase in their 2022 operating budget surrounding digital business priorities, and 77% indicated an increase in their planned technology/service spend. Both are over the average for all categories, with 39% planning to purchase in the first half of the year and an additional 40% planning to spend by the end of Q4. 

This high-interest topic will be highlighted at the following CIO Executive Summits:

Ohio CIO & CISO Executive Summit on May 25th

Pittsburg CIO & CISO Executive Summit on June 2nd

St. Louis CIO & CISO Executive Summit on June 14th

Calgary CIO & CISO Executive Summit on June 22nd

To discuss digital business priorities with other Evanta CIO or CIO & CISO communities, view upcoming summits here.