IT leaders explore footing amid shifting needs and the AI power struggle

Organizations in smaller countries such as Norway tended to continue supporting remote work because they got accustomed to having access to a larger population of skilled candidates. “But with remote and hybrid work comes new expectations in leadership,” says Rune Buseth, founding partner in Bridg AS, an executive recruitment firm there. “All managers, including IT directors, had to change their style to adapt to the trend toward dispersed workforces.”

Cloud was also high on CIO agendas. In hybrid and multicloud environments, the challenges were around cost surprises and excessive data flows between cloud and on-premises, or among different cloud environments. “IT leaders made regaining control of their cloud environments a top priority in 2023,” says Martin Hulbert, CTO of Ignite Technology, a software solutions provider based in the UK.

But cloud was still an enabler that allowed IT managers to shift their focus toward more strategic actions. CIOs who already established a cloud-enabled, adaptable, and resilient architecture in 2023 could spend less time leading IT operations and more in value creation, according to Martha Heller, CEO of Heller Search, an executive search firm based in the US. “The challenge for CIOs now is to create a data-driven culture and get business partners to chime in with high value data business cases.”

Most organizations, including Telenor Sweden, continued to move assets to the cloud in 2023. “We now have around 80% of our IT applications on public cloud,” says its CIO Kristin Lindmark. “With that change, we see great improvements in speed of development and overall performance, and a decrease in incident levels.”

And then there’s green IT, which got a lot of press at the beginning of the year, only to be drowned out by the excitement around gen AI. “While many leaders had been practicing green IT for years, as of 2023, it became imperative to measure it, quantify it, and report on it,” says Herringshaw. Scope 3 reporting, an account of carbon emissions across an organization’s supply chain, will become mandatory in 2024, which meant that most of the preparation work had to take place in 2023. And since IT is one of the biggest spenders in most companies, much of that work fell onto the shoulders of CIOs.

New technology enabled new solutions

2023 was also a year of new solutions. Procter & Gamble launched an internal LLM-based chatbot to boost productivity and innovation, calling it chatPG. “Adoption among P&Gers was comparable to what we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic, with the surge of unified messaging and video conferencing usage,” says Vittorio Cretella, the company’s CIO. “The chatPG platform provides our employees with the same capabilities as an external OpenAI model while protecting our intellectual property and IT security in ways external tools can’t yet do.”