Top 8 challenges IT leaders will face in 2021

Thanks to the tumultuous events of the past year, in 2021 IT professionals will face challenges in the workplace they’ve never seen before. There was no roadmap for taking much of the American workforce remote overnight, and none exists for a large-scale, staggered return to the hybrid environment of in-person and remote work that most organizations expect to make work in the months to come. 

Besides laying the technical groundwork for a new workplace environment, IT leaders will be faced with a number of other pandemic-inflected challenges this coming year, some unique to this era of collaborating at a distance and others ongoing, such as balancing budgets and stocking up on talent.

Following is a look at how tech leaders’ priorities have shifted since last year: around new technology adoption, digital transformation, hiring needs, and workplace culture. Here, IT leaders explain how their organizations will adapt and take on their most daunting challenges in the new year.

Facilitating the future of work

Companies are considering what the return to the workplace will look like, and post-pandemic logistics will need to incorporate employee safety, both physical and mental. Jeff McCarter, CIO of corporate and institutional services at Northern Trust, says his firm has learned to be fluid in its planning for the future of work at the firm.