3 key digital transformation priorities for 2024

2. Drive business impacts by closing operational and security gaps

Digital transformations aim to deliver competitive advantages typically through new digital products, improved customer experiences, and data-driven decision-making. Initiatives vary by industry and business strategy and may include smart manufacturing, digital health, e-government initiatives, sustainability programs, digital twins, and others.

Underpinning these initiatives are digital transformation core competencies, which include design thinking, product management, agile methodologies, devops practices, citizen development, and data governance. These practices include leadership and delivery practices backed by operational and risk management competencies, and it’s these competencies where research shows many organizations are lagging. CIOs should consider where closing these gaps falls in their digital transformation priorities.

For example, over the past decade, many CIOs promoted devops practices such as CI/CD, infrastructure as code, data observability, and closing the cultural gaps between development teams and IT operations. In the DevOps Benchmarking Study 2023, top performers realize significant business benefits, including 67% with on-demand deployment frequency and 94% with change failure rates under 15%.

But while many organizations call it devsecops, implementing devsecops security best practices is lagging, according to other surveys.   

In the SANS 2023 DevSecOps Survey, less than 22% of respondents patched and resolved critical security risks and vulnerabilities in under two days. And while static application security testing (SAST) was the top-rated tool for usefulness by 82% of respondents, only 28% claim these tools are used on at least 75% of their code base.

Here, the State of DevSevOps in 2023 report highlights several gaps CIOs should focus on closing in their 2024 digital transformations, including inadequate security training, shortages of application security personnel, and lack of transparency in development and operations workflows.  

CIOs should look for other operational and risk management practices to complement transformation programs. For example, McKinsey estimates enterprises can cut 15% to 20% of cloud costs through optimizations, and implementing finops practices is one opportunity. Another area to focus on is continuous testing, especially as generative AI and copilots can increase the velocity of code development and risks from code generators.  

3. Develop transformation leaders to drive more initiatives

The increasing demand for innovation, enterprise-wide transformation, and departmental technology, data, and automation capabilities is a significant challenge for CIOs today. It’s fairly common to see more technology investment requests than there are program managers, architects, and other leaders with roles in transformation initiatives. Add on the backlog of technical debt, security improvements, and work to transform shadow IT, and that’s one overcommitted IT department.

While not all these initiatives fit my definition of digital transformation, being able to oversee more initiatives, standardize multi-use platforms, and provide governed citizen data science programs can be highly transformative. The transformation is driven by developing more digital transformation leaders, or what I call digital trailblazers.

Gartner’s top priority for HR in 2024 is leader and manager development, given that HR leaders report that 76% of managers are overwhelmed by the growth of their job responsibilities, and juggle 51% more responsibilities than they can handle. I suspect many CIOs struggle with these same issues within their departments, especially when asking digital trailblazers to lead and contribute to too many initiatives.

To address this, CIOs should partner with HR, tap into their training and development budgets, and initiate programs to develop transformation and change management leaders. Doing so will help CIOs increase the number of initiatives IT can launch, while delivering results faster and reducing the organization’s friction to change.

As CIOs look into 2024, prioritizing the right balance of initiatives in their digital transformation programs will be challenging. Keep in mind that overpromising and underdelivering are recipes for failure, so increasing the number of digital transformation leaders and investing in learning programs are key for CIOs facing pressure to deliver greater and faster impacts.