With the changing digital landscape of 2020 and 2021, IT leaders will face more challenges than ever this year. From laying technical foundations for hybrid work environments to the digital transformation of any business, the IT space is changing rapidly.
The challenges facing IT leaders in 2022 are tremendous. As the industry looks to revolutionize productivity and the perils of cyber security are greater than ever, we are seeing many companies looking to implement new initiatives to combat the issues popping up this year.
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The Importance of Digital Transformation and IT Excellence Today
You probably heard organization after organization talk about digital transformation, and there are several reasons why. However, the number one reason is that the path of digital transformation is no longer optional—it's more necessary than ever in 2022.
The key drivers of digital transformation adoption and IT excellence today include:
- Enhancing the customer experience
- Gaining meaningful data-driven insights
- Fostering better collaboration across all departments
- Improving innovation, digital culture, and agility
Digital transformation means adopting your strategies and structure to create and capture new opportunities enabled by digital technologies. This transformation is what helps IT leaders overcome the challenges that we'll talk about next.
The Five Critical Challenges for IT Leaders Today
Now, let's dive in and explore the five critical challenges that today's IT leaders face.
- Upskilling and Training Employees
As the business priority moves beyond digital transformation endeavors toward the digital business model and innovation focuses on flexibility, agility, and speed, upscaling and training employees is more challenging than ever.
New technologies emerge quickly, resulting in the need for employees to constantly learn new skills. Promoting a culture that focuses on development and learning can help IT leaders retain top talent.
And with the focus on time to value and cloud migration, we've seen a sudden shift in which skills these leaders want to see.
Hiring new talent isn't cheap, and it's tough to find as competition intensifies. Other than technical competence, IT leaders need workers that can promote change management as technology continues to evolve.
- Establishing Effective Home Network Security
With more IT professionals working from home or on hybrid schedules come some serious security challenges. Remote work brings the issue of securing an organization's data no matter where its employees are. However, home network security must also do its job without employees feeling like they're being monitored.
And distributed work environments and hybrid and office models, cybersecurity concerns include the intrinsic vulnerabilities of these setups, ransomware, and more. In 2022, these concerns are larger than ever.
- Re-Examining and Establishing an Effective IT Budget
This year, we expect to see increased scrutiny of the price companies pay for collaboration tools. There are also likely to be reconsiderations of whether or not to bring their cloud-based systems in-house.
IT leaders and organizations must reevaluate the impact of their SaaS tools and determine whether or not the subscriptions bring a worthwhile ROI. Some organizations have pulled their tools from the cloud to deploy them on-site to negate the rising costs of cloud utilization and shrink costs in other areas.
Evaluating maintenance efforts versus cost savings is a critical part of utilizing a hybrid approach.
In 2022, organizations will need to reassess the value they generate from technology investments like AI. And if digital transformation programs are to deliver ROI, they need to devise programs that can solve specific business problems and engage with the people who own those processes
IT leaders must apply various types of technology to deal with specific problems, and they must empower and train their employees on how to use each one.
- Promoting Innovation and Digital Transformations
While digital transformation isn't new, it is growing. In fact, two out of three business owners know that their organization needs to expedite their transformation if they don't want to lose market share to their competitors.
Almost every organization will need to continue promoting innovation and stay on the path to digital transformation throughout 2022 and the years to come.
It's essential to understand which tools they will require so that the technology workforce can safely collaborate now and in the future. Organizations must also place an objective to facilitate innovation when employees work in hybrid environments.
There's also an immediate need to find and create new collaboration tools that can fulfill the needs for customer engagement and product development remotely. To get on top of these challenges, IT leaders in 2022 are looking to augmented reality tools to help supplement their services, sales, and support functions.
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- Increasing Company Emphasis on Data Protection and Cybersecurity
As more organizations embrace remote operations, cybersecurity and data protection are crucial. Businesses across all industries are coming together in an effort to protect their customer and proprietary data.
The past few years have made security teams focus on the values of operational tools and cloud-enabled security. Many of the primary considerations in 2022 include migrating to data centers and SaaS applications, reassessing remote access policies, and reducing face-to-face interactions with digitization initiatives.
To maintain data security and privacy, IT leaders and organizations must leverage these new cybersecurity technologies while implementing their digital initiatives.
Need to Overcome These IT Challenges? Here's How HubbleIQ Can Help!
With more remote users across your organization, network security and quality become a huge challenge for your IT department. Your employees' devices are no longer within reach of your IT team, leading to more downtime. These issues can reduce employee engagement productivity, raise additional security risks, and increase support costs.
With the HubbleIQ Dashboard, IT leaders and organizations can start overcoming the challenges they face in 2022. From devices to networks and applications, we can help you get the real-time insights you need to solve your IT challenges and prevent them from causing workflow disruptions.
You're an expert in your industry—we're an expert in hybrid remote work and digital employee experience management. Let's work together and eliminate the top IT challenges of 2022 and beyond.
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