A CTO looks after an organization’s technological needs and makes tech investments that contribute towards short-term and long-term goals.
There was a time when a company’s CIO also doubled up as the CTO but with time the needs of businesses changed, and with them the responsibilities of a CIO. Today a CIO focuses on the internal tech requirement of the company, while the CTO looks after how to use technology to satisfy the external stakeholders.
Ultimately, both these roles contribute to driving the revenue of the organization by ensuring technological advancements in their respective spheres. Today, with the ever-evolving pace of technology, the job of the CTO is getting increasingly challenging and they need a proper workforce, infrastructure, data, and tools to successfully manage it.
Top Challenges Faced by CTOs
- Security Threats
- Lack of Innovation
- Scarcity of Skilled Workforce
- Poor Digital Adoption
Security Threats
With the advent of new technologies, diverse methods are being used by hackers to threaten global organizations. Since the pandemic, the rise of cyber-attacks has drastically increased. As of 2021, cybercrime will incur damage of $6 trillion which is more than ever and could possibly reach $10.5 trillion by 2025.
18.5 million websites are attacked via malware in any given week and each website is attacked 44 times on average. While malware is a type of cyber-attack, what you need to be even more careful about is Ransomware.
Ransomware is the form of malicious software that threatens to harm the organization by denying access to your own data and data is only made available once the demanded ransom is paid to the hackers. Ransomware attack alone contributes to 81% of all financially motivated attacks and what is even more alarming is that 50% of the cybersecurity experts believe that organizations are not prepared to repel a ransomware attack.
The average cost of a data breach is somewhere around $3.86 million. Further, these data can be shared with other interested parties which could impact both your financials and reputation. So, it is very evident that CTOs must be prepared in 2021 to fight the security threats and bolster their infrastructure to survive these attacks and save millions of dollars.
Lack of Innovation
Businesses are undergoing severe transformation and that can only be complemented by innovation. Today, CTOs can also be called Chief Transformation Officers as they are here to challenge the current business models with transformative technologies and ideas.
It is important to understand that the job of a CTO is to clear the business backlogs first and use technology to grow their business. But we now live in an era where CTOs have to continuously innovate and transform the way business is being conducted.
The current requirements of a business hinder the transformative part of the business and as a result, leaders tend to ignore or delay the innovation process. Interestingly, 54% of leaders struggle to align innovation strategy with business strategy which is a major roadblock. Also, this decade has set the tone for change and the only way to sustain any business is to invent, innovate and initiate.
The ideal approach would be to kickstart innovation that can help you to initiate transformation that can align with overall business goals. This does not mean that you invest in physical resources. Rather, you can take the help of your existing employees and find how to improve the existing process, tech stack, approach, and solutions that can contribute towards the development of the organization.
Innovation need not always be discovered within the organization. You can always get new tools, and services that can help you to foster innovation by allowing you to easily deploy it and scale.
Scarcity of Skilled Workforce
In any Enterprise, software applications are always updated, business processes constantly evolve to meet the growing needs of the company, legacy infrastructure is replaced with modern solutions, and integration of various applications happens at a rapid rate.
When these many things are happening within the organization, it is necessary to upgrade your workforce so they can use the latest technology, application and manage new infrastructure. The biggest challenge is to find the right fit for your business. Hiring talented employees is always an option but ensuring that they understand the business can be a task.
Secondly, the minimum cost per hire is approximately $4000 and adds to that the onboarding cost. Bringing the new employees up to speed would be that much more difficult and your investment would not produce any real value unless it is able to generate business outcomes.
Large companies have even bigger hiring challenges as 67% of the organizations reported the hiring of the right candidate is getting increasingly difficult because of the lack of experience and hard skills that the job demands. The need of the hour now is having an army of employees who understand the business and can also drive results. So then, what would be the ideal way to go about it?
Training your existing employees would be a better option than hiring. You must encourage them to adopt the latest tech stack that will help to achieve the business goals.
First, you can explain how the latest applications and technology will ensure that the job gets easy and how they will be able to invest more time in doing their actual job and show better results.
Tools like Apty, a Digital Adoption Platform, can train your employees while they are doing their job and help them achieve their task in no time. Apty’s in-app guidance ensures they are less dependent and could accomplish their tasks without worrying about the technicalities.
Poor Digital Adoption
As of 2020, 30% of the companies are still considered laggards as they are still refraining from technology adoption. If you are in that 30%, it could impact customer retention and employee engagement which eventually impacts the business.
To serve customers better the employees must be in a position that they can create maximum effect with resources they have by their side. New applications are harder to adopt especially when companies try to adapt them to their organizational goals and processes.
Traditional training methods take time to show results. It always better to go with the solution that can help you achieve immediate goals and also ensures that your employees are in a position to become the power users of the application.
Apty is one of the few Digital Adoption Platforms that empowers you to achieve that and helps you gain insights that will allow you to design workflows, business processes and improve the training content for your employees. Apty sits right on top of your application and guides your employees from one step to another and helps them accomplish their task. It contains all the knowledge content that your employees need within the application and as a result, their time is saved.
They can start using complex applications like Salesforce, Oracle, or Workday from day 1 without being intimidated by the complexities of the application.
Interestingly, since the pandemic, digital training and onboarding have become a high priority for enterprises and the Digital Adoption Platforms have been a boon for them. Investing in a DAP will help you and your employees to be efficient in their jobs as it is powered by analytics, workflows, automation, and most important of all, process compliance tools.
What Lies Ahead?
The CTO is the digital leader of the organization and in a world that is increasingly becoming digital, with each passing day there will several hurdles. Whether it is a security threat, customer experience, digital transformation, or technology adoption, each of these has its own challenges.
But the good news is with every challenge lies an opportunity that can accelerate the growth of the organization and help you set in a path where you can beat the competition and become the market leader. While there are some challenges that you may face which may not be solved by tech solutions, thankfully there is Apty to handles all your adoption-related challenges.
