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At Info-Tech, we take pride in our research and have established the most rigorous publication standards in the industry. However, we understand that it may not always be possible to engage with all of our analysts to gauge the future. Hence, we have curated some compelling forthcoming research insights to assist you in navigating the next quarter.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

We offer a quarterly Research Agenda Outcomes deck that presents a thorough summary of our upcoming research, supplying decision makers with valuable insights and best practices to make informed and effective decisions. Our research is supported by our team of seasoned analysts with decades of experience in the IT industry.

By leveraging our research, you can stay updated with the latest trends and technologies, giving you an edge over the competition and ensuring the optimal performance of your IT department. This way, you can make confident decisions that lead to remarkable success and improved outcomes.

Impact and Result

Enhance preparedness for future market trends and developments: Keep up to date with the newest trends and advancements in the IT sector to be better prepared for the future.
Enhance your decision making: Acquire valuable information and insights to make better-informed, confident decisions.
Promote innovation: Foster creativity, explore novel perspectives, drive innovation, and create new products or services.

Info-Tech Quarterly Research Agenda Q3 2023 Research & Tools

1. Info-Tech Quarterly Research Agenda Q3 2023 Deck – An overview of our Research Agenda for Q3 of 2023.

This artifact is a comprehensive list of our upcoming Q3 Research Agenda.

Context

This document outlines our upcoming TOP research projects for the next quarter.

If you are interested in contributing to any of these research pieces in development, please reach out to your trusted Info-Tech advisor or our SVP of Research Development, Jack Hakimian (jhakimian@infotech.com).

Quarterly Research Agenda

Overview of Our Quarterly Research Agenda
Selection of Our Quarterly Research Highlights
Role-Based Research
Industry Research
About Info-Tech

Better research than anyone

We provide better research than anyone to our members across two major pillars:

Role-based research

Foundational and leading, practical research oriented along the key roles in technology departments such as CIO, CISO, or the (S)VP of Infrastructure.

Industry research

Deep, industry-specific methodologies and guidelines to complement our role-based research and provide context for your industry.

Evolve Your Software Development Lifecycle to a Solution Delivery Lifecycle

Focusing on solutions helps unify the business

This research is intended to:

Synthesize existing ITRG research that is siloed and on the cusp of being outdated as it focuses on the concept of software being developed in-house and passed onto operations. In addition, this research has a very waterfall-centric view of the world.
Re-frame the conversation from delivering software to delivering solutions. This can be software, processes, products, in-house, outsourced, etc.

Increasingly complicated solutions require more resources

Many delivery groups have evolved to address immediate business concerns in a responsive manner without really understanding how or why they are doing what they are doing.

Today’s rapidly scaling, increasingly complex solutions create mounting pressure on delivery teams to release new features and changes quickly and with sufficient quality.

Challenges include:

Increasingly complicated solutions require more resources to work together in lockstep when the organization isn’t prepared.
Many organizations lack the critical capabilities and resources needed to satisfy their growing backlog, jeopardizing solution success.

Desired outcome of your SDLC is focused on delivery, not development

SDLC must deliver more than software. Business value is generated through the products and services delivered by your SDLC. Teams must provide the required product support, and stakeholders must be willing to participate in the product’s delivery.
The greatest need for quality filters is at each handoff in your delivery steps. Handoff between teams dramatically increases risk and the opportunity for errors.
Delivery quality and throughput go hand in hand. Focus on meeting minimum process and product quality standards first. Improved throughput will eventually follow.
Business integration is not optional. The business must be involved in guiding delivery efforts, ongoing validation, and verification of product changes.

Target Audience

CIO, Senior IT Leader, Head of Applications

Develop a More Flexible IT Funding Model

Focusing on solutions helps unify the business

Obtaining adequate and evergreen funding for IT projects and operations is an ongoing source of stress for IT leaders – there never seems to be enough, and funding sources for long-term initiatives or programs can dry up.

Many IT leaders don’t challenge the traditional IT funding models that have become standard in their organizations – they just accept them as the law of the land and continue to scramble to support essential technologies and service levels year after year.

This blueprint seeks to:

Open IT leaders’ eyes to the full range of funding models available and how they work together to create more flexibility in the supply, allocation, and reallocation of funds in the near term in response to changing business conditions.
Provide more confidence that the organization’s existing technology investments will remain healthy in the long term.

Stop being viewed as a cost center

Most IT departments are locked into an inflexible funding model, which can make it impossible to adjust spend based on changing business conditions.
A time-limited, fixed funding amount is often tied to a specific project far in advance of that project actually starting.
Over time, required deliverables and components of a project can change, as can the costs of the needed hardware, software, and expertise.
Most funding models focus on initial, near-term capital expenses and not on the long-term operational costs of maintaining, supporting, and growing existing investments. As such, many IT initiatives start CapEx rich but end OpEx poor.

Present the correct perspective

IT leaders don’t have to live with inflexible funding models that prevent IT from delivering value to the business.

These models can be changed to increase the odds of the right money being in the right place at the right time.

Target Audience

CIO, Senior IT Leader, Head of Applications

Establish an End-to-End IT Risk Assessment Framework

Drive value though effective assessment of risk

A risk assessment is a tool for organizations to identify, assess, and modify their risk posture. It is used as a key input to the control framework and is often the means in which organizations find unknown risks.
A risk assessment is a proactive risk management tool and is often preformed in advance of an internal or external audit.
Outputs from the risk assessment are critical for decision making and can be used for cost justification, to increase productivity, and of course for risk prevention.
A risk assessment is a key element of a risk program but is absent from our current material.

Risk reporting is inconsistent and difficult to communicate

The rapid adoption of technology and the move toward digitalization has increased the breadth of IT risks, making it difficult to have a proactive approach to risk management. A risk assessment is a critical tool to identify risks.

Since the pandemic, global regulators are focusing on operational resiliency (defined as an organization’s ability to sustain operations through a disruption). A risk assessment is a methodical way to identify any gaps and weaknesses in your risk control framework.

Shareholders demand that organizations manage material risks.
Strong risk practices are important to a number of influential stakeholders.
Auditing protocols require forward-looking risk management.
Rating agencies look for evidence that management understands and is handling risks.

Plan for potential risk events and ensure the organization is prepared

Risk assessments are difficult to get right because risks change so rapidly. You need to ask the right questions to evaluate the unknown risk event. Your assessment framework needs to consider traditional IT risks as well as AI, ethical, ESG, economic, geopolitical, and other risks.
Drive value and resilience though effective assessment of risk.
Risk assessments need to be repeatable and reportable. Ensure alignment from assessment through to board reporting

Target Audience

CIO, CRO

The CIO Roadmap: A toolkit series for leadership success

CEOs are looking to technology & digital to drive strategic growth

Technology is intricately woven into every fabric of the business. Given this shift, organizations are looking for a modern CIO who can deliver business value from technology investment. Making the shift from being a technology evangelist to a business leader can be overwhelming without a plan for:

Newly appointed CIOs with limited business skills.
CIOs who are new to an organization.
An organization that is going through a significant change like restructuring, bankruptcy, M&A, hyper-growth, etc.

The modern CIO will need an effective gameplan to shift the perception of IT as a cost center to instead being viewed as a cost generator

CIOs in transition often face significant challenges and struggle to create a plan to manage their:

Time: Crushing demands will be made on your time, and knowing where to focus and how you will enforce that focus time will be critical for success.
Talent and Capabilities: Understanding the talent and the capabilities needed to support demand will help CIOs use their time effectively.
Relationships: Knowing your sphere of influence will require understanding your stakeholders and effectively managing those relationships will be critical to your success.

Changing your gameplan is the key to success

Our approach helps CIOs pull together an effective gameplan based on seven secret ingredients for success:

Manage Stakeholder Satisfaction & Relationships
Build Strong Core IT Processes
Train & Develop Talent and Leadership
Deliver Mission-Critical Projects
Right-Size Risk Spending & Tolerance
Technology & Vendor Management
Drive Business Value & Transformation

Target Audience

CIO, CTO

Vision to Results: The essential annual playbook

Data-driven decision making

ITRG’s Business Vision Diagnostic highlights areas of lesser business satisfaction with IT services and areas of IT that need to improve performance.

Following completion of the diagnostic, this research will guide members on how they can use the results to develop an ongoing IT improvement program that will:

Convert business vision diagnostic results into tangible improvement initiatives.
Develop timelines and a roadmap and assign responsibilities to execute these initiatives.
Develop metrics to track progress and tie-in with IT performance appraisals.
Manage ongoing communication with key stakeholders through a deliberate stakeholder communication plan.

Be a business partner, not an order taker

After receiving business vision diagnostic results, CIOs/delegates find it difficult to objectively arrive at remedial actions that correlate to the results. Challenges include:

There is unclear alignment on prioritization especially in cases where there are many red/amber areas in the diagnostic, and CIOs find it difficult to arrive at remedial themes to address.
Data in the diagnostic that are at the IT Services level can be open to different interpretations and might not always be complete/ without need for additional IT/business context for arriving at the right initiatives.
Remedial actions are not executed well as they are not tracked with the right metrics and not aligned to performance management.
Remedial actions do not always get executive sponsorship as there is a lack of trust between business and IT.

Improve stakeholder satisfaction with an ongoing IT improvement program

Members will benefit tremendously in managing IT performance as well as improving business relationships by institutionalizing a post-diagnostics IT improvement program and following the below steps:

Supplement business vision diagnostics data with additional Business/IT data as needed.
Conduct a root cause analysis to arrive at underlying improvement opportunities and themes.
Follow ITRG methodology to prioritize themes in a data-driven manner to develop initiatives.
Develop governance around execution of these initiatives.
Develop a communication plan to systematically engage key stakeholders.
Input IT Initiatives to your overall IT strategy.

Target Audience

CIO, CIO Delegates (Deputy CIO, Strategy Leaders)

How to Implement Responsible AI

Understand the business opportunity of responsible AI

This research will offer an overview of the best practices in adopting responsible AI guiding principles and how to implement them within your organization by:

Helping business leaders understand how AI is being used within their organization and the risks, and provide guidance on how a principles-based approach can be implemented to manage that risk across business and technology layers.
Providing an overview of how implementing AI responsibly can be used for competitive advantage, ensuring the focus is anchored in value not just compliance and risk.
Demonstrating a practical, principles-based approach that any organization can adopt before or after the implementation of AI that will help to manage corporate AI risk and support safe innovation.

A practical toolkit that can help business leaders, supported by the CIO and risk functions, ensure that AI development is subject to rigorous controls that ensure its design and implementation is done ethically and responsibly.

Consumers expect the organization to implement AI responsibly

Given the pace and rate of change there is a growing concern on the ethical use of AI and its potential risks and consequences with its adoption.
Regulation lags behind how AI is implemented; however, the reputational and financial risks of implementing AI without appropriate consideration are real and highly impactful. Businesses must learn to govern AI themselves first.
Organizations are struggling to understand how to implement AI in a responsible manner that allows them to leverage the technology to support growth and efficiency while mitigating these risks.
This is not a technology leadership issue to solve, but technology teams will play a significant role in ensuring AI is developed responsibly.

Potential for competitive advantage

Adoption of Responsible AI guiding principles can help ensure that AI is developed and deployed in a fair, transparent, and accountable manner.

This will both minimize the risk for unintended consequences and negative impacts to the organization and the community it serves and also provide potential competitive advantage if the organizations customers, consumers, staff, suppliers, and other stakeholders can trust that AI has been implemented in a responsible and ethical manner.

Target Audience

CIO/CTO, CRO, Head of Business (C-Suite), Head of Digital

Architecting Your Data & AI Landscape for Security, Privacy & Data Sharing

Designing with the fundamentals in mind is key to your success

For a data landscape and ecosystem to scale for data, analytics, and AI as an organization evolves there are some key foundational design decisions you need to correct from the outset.

This is particularly pertinent when architecting these platforms to meet privacy, security, and data-sharing obligations and requirements.

This research will focus on providing members the foundational guidelines and practical implementation tools to ensure that your data and AI landscape is designed with security, privacy and data sharing in mind.

With ever-changing regulatory requirements and rapidly evolving data, analytics, and AI use cases and tools, planning how to construct a scalable data landscape can be a daunting task.

Increasing sophistication in security threats, constantly emerging and changing privacy regulations, and a drive toward greater data monetization is placing increasing burdens upon how an organization constructs and manages their data, analytics, and AI landscape.

Coupled with ever evolving data, analytics and AI technologies, data and technology leaders are often uncomfortable and challenged in making design decisions and investments in the composable parts of the landscape that will support scaling and avoid re-work in the future.

A focused architectural approach will drive the benefits you seek

Taking a true architectural approach and providing actionable design principles that can be leveraged in technology acquisition and implementation control processes, and that will also support data and technology leaders in making better-informed decisions will help ensure the data, analytics, and AI landscape they support scales in a way that meets evolving privacy, security, and data sharing requirements.

Target Audience

CDAO, Enterprise Architect & Data Architect, CDO, CTO/CIO

Transforming Governance and Risk in an Exponential IT World

Exponential IT requires elevated governance and risk practices

This research is intended to:

Explain the impact of exponential IT and the changing role of IT to support embedded risk and governance decision making.
Provide an overview of Info-Tech’s position on how exponential IT transforms governance and risk.
Provide a framework to assess your current and target governance and risk maturity and establish a roadmap to accelerate your decision making and risk.

Exponential IT introduces unprecedented risk and requires rapid decision making

Effective governance and risk management has always been an IT requirement, but organizations have consistently struggled to execute on these effectively. Many organizations still manage by chain of command and there is limited trust across the full organization to execute let alone to gain digital trust. Additional challenges include:

Risk is perceived as the antithesis to innovation, which is incorrect.
Governance is not flexible or adaptive enough to allow for shifting focus and exponential demand.
Automated decision making needs a foundation of clear principles, ethics, and a means for assurance. Many organizations continue to focus on consensus for decision making, which creates a bottleneck and inconsistent outcomes.

Three requirements for governance and risk in an exponential IT world

Governance & risk by design: Prioritization, privacy, compliance, recovery, and accessibility need to be built into all your processes, not left as an afterthought. This transforms the capability from a role in your organization to a culture of value-driven risk awareness.
Embed and automate decision making in all processes and ways of working. This shift represents a transition from “Doc & Talk” governance to data-centric. This requires delegating authority and data-driven decision enablement.
Humanity driven: While we leverage automation and other cutting-edge technologies, we need to ground this in a clear north star. This requires clearly defined intent and principles, decision criteria, ethics & social position, and digital trust.

The foundation of this change is rooted in culture & assurance.

Target Audience

CIO, CFO, COO, CEO, CRO, CDO

Assess Infrastructure Readiness for Digital Transformation

Invest smartly in the current market

By modernizing infrastructure through digital transformation, businesses and organizations can position themselves for success in a rapid and increasingly competitive environment that is changing with technology advancements.

This research will offer guidance on how to:

Build improved efficiencies through infrastructure modernization and depleting technical debt.
Build a better customer experience (UX) through technical advancements.
Enhance security and build scalability.

Digital transformation is giving IT a new mandate

Conventionally, organizations approached transformation as investments in new technology, with no vision into what they are trying to transform. Lack of strategy will cause limited outcomes.

Digital transformation is giving IT a new mandate. It’s no longer enough for IT to passively support business functions. Instead, today’s IT plays a critical role in enabling transformation and driving long-term growth for the entire enterprise. This brings new challenges and complexities, but with the right systems and processes, IT can become the agent of change the enterprise needs.

Deliver the right resources at the right times

By driving a customer-centric approach, delivering a successful transformation can be tailored to the business goals and can drive adoption and engagement.

Refining your roadmap through data and analytics will drive this change.
Be customer-centric as opposed to being technology driven.
Understanding the business needs and pain points is key to delivering the right solutions.

Target Audience

CIO, Deputy CIO, CISO, Applications Director

Build an Automation Roadmap to Streamline Your Security Processes

Technology to automate security processes grows at a rapid rate in the constant need to reduce cyber risk

Security leaders are bombarded with a wide variety of automation solutions but are not comfortable with which security tasks are appropriate for automation given the task’s risk factor, frequency of execution, measurable benefit of automation, and when weighed against their own trust in the automation of the task itself.

This blueprint will aid members in:

Evaluating security automation capabilities and assessing current capabilities.
Identifying opportunities for automation.

Lack of skills and automation complexities prevent change

Security leaders have the ambition to automate the right security tasks and processes to optimize resourcing and costs while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

However, they struggle to proceed as they are often hit by:

Increased complexity of security threats.
Lack of skilled security professionals.
Increased regulatory requirements.
Expensive security solutions.

Security automation investments drive business value

Improved speed and efficiency: Security automation tools can help quickly identify and respond to security incidents, reducing response times and improving overall efficiency.
Greater accuracy and consistency: Automation reduces the risk of human error and ensures that security policies and procedures are consistently applied.
Improved threat detection and response: Automation tools can help to detect and respond to security threats faster and more effectively than manual processes, reducing the risk of a successful attack.

Target Audience

CIO, Deputy CIO, CISO, Applications Director

Deliver Customer Value by Building Digital Trust

Digital trust drives customer loyalty

IT can enable digital trust for their business by embedding initiatives that assure trust into their IT strategy.

By finding enablers to increase trust based on their various applicable customer personas, IT leaders can help their organization drive customer value both externally and internally.

Common digital trust frameworks rely on incidental focus around key areas (digital ID, policy transparency, “people/process/technology,” ethics, reputation, and customer value), but do not provide practical approaches to improve digital trust.

Digital technologies are complex and continue to evolve

As more and more of our daily interactions take place in the digital realm, the issue of digital trust has become increasingly urgent. Without digital trust, businesses cannot function effectively, consumers cannot feel secure in their online interactions, and the potential for fraud, identity theft, and other cybercrimes increases.

The problem is that digital trust is difficult to establish and requires complex cybersecurity systems, privacy protection, and user education. Furthermore, as digital technologies evolve and new threats emerge, the challenge of maintaining digital trust becomes ever more complex.

Solving the problem of digital trust is critical for creating a safe and secure digital environment that can support continued innovation and growth in the digital economy.

Finding enablers will increase trust

Digital trust goes beyond just identity trust: IT can enable digital trust for their business by identifying customer personas and finding enablers to increase trust.
Staying up-to-date with the latest threats and vulnerabilities: Organizations should stay informed about the latest threats and vulnerabilities in cyberspace and implement measures to address them as they arise.
Implement automated security technologies: Automated security technologies, such as intrusion detection and prevention systems, can help to identify and mitigate security threats in real-time.

Target Audience

CIO, CISO, CFO, CRO, CMO

Build a CEO Monthly IT Update Package

Adapt your agenda to get leadership the right information

All CIOs have regular progress updates with their direct managers (commonly CEO, CFO, COO).

These meetings are intended to provide the CEO with the information necessary to make informed business decisions, both about IT and the organization itself.

These are the most important meetings a CIO attends and their outcomes and structure should not be left to chance.

Many CIOs leave their most important monthly meeting to chance

Most CIOs do not have a rigorous plan for how they will update their CEOs during their monthly meetings.

They often lack the craft skills required to produce consulting-quality presentations that are concise, compelling, and visually attractive.

Deliver results in a meaningful way

Info-Tech’s CIO Monthly Update Package will reduce the effort required to prepare for the most important meeting every month.

Structured to follow the department’s IT Strategy, they are concise, precise, compelling, and visually attractive.

Target Audience

CIO, CTO, Other department leaders who also may have to update/present to the CEO, CFO or COO (e.g., security, infrastructure, applications etc.).

Our research projects in the quarter ahead

Applications

Evolve Your Software Development Lifecycle to a Solution Delivery Lifecycle (Refresh)

As solutions move from being tools to being the core of the business, this research aims to help IT leaders select, document, and plan for moving to a solution delivery lifecycle that is more about business collaboration and value (and not development driven).

Impact of AI on Requirements Management

With advances in RPA, ML, and AI having an impact on what is involved in implementing modern requirements management practices, this research will help IT leaders outline their guiding principles on using AI in their RM processes.

Rationalize Your Application Portfolio (Refresh)

This research aims to revisit and refresh the highly consumed Rationalize Your Application Portfolio output.

Perform a Strategic Application Risk Assessment

This research aims to help IT leaders communicate what their strategic applications are and to identify which ones are putting their organization at risk. It will provide a strategic level assessment of their portfolio and a clear line of sight into their critical applications and their overall health.

CoE vs. CoP vs. C4E: What is right for you?

We aim to assist you in identifying which will fit your requirements best, a CoE, CoP, or C4E, by providing a reusable tool that considers your organization structure and process maturity.

Improve Requirements Gathering (Refresh)

This research aims to revisit and update the current Improve Requirements Gathering blueprint.

CIO IT Finance

Develop a More Flexible IT Funding Model

This research will help IT leaders understand the full range of funding models available and select the option that will deliver the most value to their organization. It will outline how different models work to create more flexibility of funds in the near term in response to changing business conditions, as well as provide more confidence that existing investments remain healthy in the long term.

Make Your IT Financial Data Accessible, Reliable, and Usable

It’s imperative that IT leaders assert ownership over IT financial data and manage it appropriately, as it is critical for making technology spend decisions. This project will provide a recipe for bringing IT financial data to a usable state through a series of discovery, standardization, and policy-setting actions.

Develop Your IT Leadership Team’s Financial Literacy

One of the major obstacles to IT’s ability to demonstrate the value it’s delivering to the business is a basic lack of knowledge around financial fundamentals. This research will address the fundamentals of IT finance terminology and methods and how they fit together.

Build an IT Budget (Refresh)

The purpose of this project is to refresh our current publication Build an IT Budget with updated methodology to align closer to the needs of our members.

Cost Optimization Research Center (Refresh)

The purpose of this project is to update our Cost Optimization Research Center with up-to-date data sets.

CIO Org Transformation

Define Enterprise IT and Digital Services

While Enterprise Service definitions & design is critical to communicate IT value, most IT organizations struggle to define what a service is. Digital transformation and truly digital organizations need to recenter their delivery conversations to focus on the end-to end experience of services. This research aims to make hidden services apparent and highlight IT’s organizational contribution.

Design the IT Organization of the Future (Refresh)

In this research we will address how to leverage your IT operating model and strategy to determine the right organizational chart, roles and responsibilities, and staffing levels and determine the core delivery processes across the organization.

Establish an End-to-End IT Risk Assessment Framework

The rapid adoption of technology and move toward digitalization has increased the breadth of IT risks making it difficult to have a proactive approach to risk management. This risk assessment is a tool to identify and communicate risks and create action plans to address them.

Transforming Governance and Risk in an Exponential IT World

This research will help you understand the impact of exponential IT on the changing role of IT, provide a framework to assess current and target governance and risk, and establish a roadmap to accelerate decision making in the face of risk.

IT Policy Research Center & Policy Development (Refresh)

This research is meant to help make policy writing easy. Save time and money using the templates provided to create your own customized policies mapped to the Info-Tech risk framework.

CIO People & Leadership

IT Employee Engagement/EXM Resources (Refresh)

In this research, we recommend using a design-thinking approach to improve employees' lived experiences in the workplace because this problem-solving approach puts the end user — the employee — at the center. Start with the employee lifecycle and the areas within it that will have the most impact.

IT Employee Experience Keynote

Using our Employee Experience and Engagement tool data, we will look at how employee engagement and experience has changed since the start of the pandemic and how IT employee experience differs from the broader organization, and we will identify actions organizations can take to drive a positive experience in a remote world.

IT Talent Trends Part 1: Hypothesis and Question Design

This research, informed by our survey for IT leaders, aims to explore and identify key trends in the IT talent landscape today.

Info-Tech Research Group Leadership Forum Series

These forums will include an introduction to core leadership topics, breakout activities, and panel discussions for IT professionals to hear from other leaders and grow their leadership skills.

Management Fundamentals Product Launch

Moving from an individual contributor to management is the hardest transition IT leaders make. This research will set your teams up for success by ensuring future and new managers know how to excel in their role.

Women in Tech – Program (Refresh)

This research will be a refresh to our Women in Tech program, which aims to connect women across our member base, creating meaningful moments that matter and learning opportunities that go beyond training to career changing.

CIO Strategy

Drive Innovation With an Exponential IT Mindset

This research will provide members with a view on how to adopt new approaches to leverage autonomization and drive innovation across the enterprise.

Exponential IT: Managing Exponential Value Partnerships

This research will provide members with a view on how to adapt your vendor management approach to drive value in the era of Exponential IT.

The CIO Roadmap: A toolkit series for leadership success

Technology has become core to the DNA of every business. CEO’s are looking to technology and digital to drive strategic growth in order to become a source of competitive differentiation in an increasingly competitive market. However, the modern CIO will need an effective gameplan to shift the perception of IT as a cost center to being a cost generator. This output will help CIOs remain relevant well into the future beyond the current tenure of the technology evangelist (three to four years) to that of a “chief value broker.”

Vision to Results: The essential annual playbook

This CIO business vision diagnostic is meant to be an annual program to inform IT strategy, improve stakeholder relationship management, and manage IT performance.

Data & Analytics

AI Trends and Predictions

AI is a rapidly expanding space with key CX-level interest. The aim of this trends report is to arm our members with a view on the near future trends and applications of AI, which can accelerate conversations with business partners.

Architecting Your D&A Landscape for Security, Privacy & Data Sharing

This research aims to help technology leaders understand current and future requirements for privacy, security, and data sharing, and guides design decisions that should help create a composable, scalable, and sound data landscape/ecosystem that reduces the effective overall cost (and risk) of managing an organization's data.

Build a Reporting and Analytics Strategy (Refresh)

This research provides templates to build a strategy and roadmap for your reporting and analytics strategy. The refresh will expand the coverage to include operating model considerations for predominant BI tools and upcoming natural language processing-based tools.

Build MLOps and Engineering for AI & ML

With AI and ML becoming more pervasive and higher on both business and IT leadership agendas, this research will provide an understanding of data engineering and ML model management requirements to support current, planned, and likely future cases for AI and ML and make sound ecosystem and related technology investment decisions.

Build Your Data Landscape to Support Data, Analytics, and AI at Scale – Research Center

This research center will be a one-stop shop that a technology leader can reference for building all or any component part of the data landscape needed to deliver their multi-year data strategy execution.

Create a Right-Sized EA Governance Framework (Refresh)

This research will update our EA Governance framework and provide guidance for members to support their strategic EA objectives.

Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

This research will provide a framework and guidance for members on the roles and skills required to support their data and analytics strategic growth objectives and how to execute a plan to build and attract the talent required.

Implementing AI Responsibly

This research is meant to provide a practical, principles-based approach that any organization can adopt before or after the implementation of AI that will help to manage corporate AI risk and support safe innovation.

Metaverse Industry Agnostic Topic

This output will provide an overview of how metaverse and its related technologies have been used in Industry to date with recommendations on how organizations can prepare for adoption in terms of people, process, and technology to leverage technology advancements.

Infrastructure & Operations

Align Your Backups With Your Data Protection Requirements

Despite having a data protection strategy in place, organizations are at risk of cyber threats due to outdated security measures and inadequate capabilities to meet evolving data protection and privacy regulations. This output will modernize your data protection plan to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information, mitigate security risks, and comply with regulatory requirements.

Assess Infrastructure Readiness for Digital Transformation

This framework will be for I&O leaders to develop a comprehensive digital transformation strategy that aligns with business objectives and drives value across the organization.

Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams

This blueprint will provide a methodology for IT to enable their end-users to use Microsoft Teams more effectively by focusing on tools instead of reference instructions.

Govern Your O365 (Refresh)

The output will provide a refresh of our existing Govern Your O365 methodology.

Implement Software Asset Management (Refresh)

With the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the scope and complexity of software asset management has evolved, and it’s become easier to increase both spending and non-compliance. Organizations must strategically monitor software usage and spending both on-premises and in the cloud to make better decisions around cloud providers, manage contracts, forecast demand, optimize spend, and control license usage. Because of this, the existing Implement Software Asset Management content will be refreshed to align closer with member requirements.

Maximize Your Cloud Business Value With FinOps

Runaway cloud costs are wrecking the CIO’s budget and these cloud costs are difficult to tame. This output will evaluate existing guidance and provide a practical approach to putting those guardrails into practice correctly.

Project and Portfolio Management

Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports (Refresh)

This project aims to enhance our existing Enhance PPM Dashboard and Reports output by producing deliverables that are more relevant and practical.

Optimize IT Project Intake (Refresh)

This project aims to revisit and refresh our existing Optimize IT Project Intake output.

Tailor IT Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects (Refresh)

This project aims to revisit and refresh our existing Tailor IT Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects output.

Research Fellowship

Exponential IT: From Evolutionary to Revolutionary

The exponential IT curve has past the knee and is about to turn nearly vertical. Over the past three decades, we've seen what appear to be revolutionary advancements in technology that have forced IT to evolve rapidly. As AI passes the knee of the curve, it has become revolutionary and that will be sustained - this is not a blip or a step function. It ultimately leads to the next evolution of IT departments and CIOs from Business enablers to becoming the real driver of the business itself. This requires CIOs and Technology leaders to rethink how IT departments create value for organizations in an Exponential World. We call this concept Exponential IT.

Enable Member Value Through Generative AI Use Cases

Generative AI provides almost unlimited opportunities to re-envision value creation across all industries. We are driving research on how we can leverage generative AI to provide more value for our members. This is not a cost-cutting lens. This is a value-creation and enablement lens.

Security

Address Security and Privacy Implications of Enterprise AI Deployment

Rapid generative AI development is triggering the expansive use of this technology in all types of organizations. This project will assist IT leaders to enable their businesses while addressing risks associated with how AI consumes critical data and PII.

Board Directors’ Guide for Governing Cybersecurity Risk in Australia

This project aims to provide an Australian directors’ and executives’ security obligations primer for boards, CIOs, and CISOs to improve their organization’s security posture. Content will build on common industry standards relevant to organizations operating in Australia and New Zealand.

Build an Automation Roadmap to Streamline Your Security Processes

The purpose of this project is to help member organizations evaluate security automation capabilities and identify opportunities for automation.

Build an Information Security Strategy (Refresh)

The purpose of this project is to revisit and refresh our existing Build an Information Security Strategy output.

Create a Cybersecurity Skills Development Plan to Upskill Your IT Staff

This output is a skills development framework mapped to common security job roles or functions to help organizations develop their IT and security staff and ensure a healthy pipeline for resourcing the security program. The product would also provide the basis for members’ future budget defence to retain (and grow) formal training and career development funding.

Deliver Customer Value by Building Digital Trust

While common digital trust frameworks rely on incidental focus around key areas (digital ID, policy transparency, “people/process/technology,” ethics, reputation, and customer value), they do not provide approaches for digital trust. This output will provide a practical approach to improving digital trust

Develop a Security Awareness and Training Program That Empowers End Users (Refresh)

This output will revisit and refine our existing Security Awareness and Training Program.

Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program (Refresh)

This output will revisit and refine our existing Security Incident Management Program including all 35 deliverables.

Modernize Your Password Standards

Password and authentication complexity alone do not guarantee protection. User behaviors around rigid or legacy complexities compromise password effectiveness. This output will demystify modern password best practices and provide a risk-based rationale for adoption.

Protect Your Organization’s Online Reputation

Organizations can apply various domain and configuration settings to minimize domain and email spoofing/phishing impact on their end users. In addition, leveraging the correct online reputation monitoring services will enhance their protection. This output is meant to provide a holistic framework and a report template to rationalize investments in this area and gain stakeholder support.

Security Governance & Management Academy (Refresh)

This output will revisit, refresh and refine our existing Security Governance and Management blueprint.

Cross-Cutting Projects

Build a CEO Monthly IT Update Package – Be Prepared for Your Most Important Meeting Every Month

This output will apply to CIOs/CTOs and other department leaders who will have to update/present to the CEO by aiding in the production of presentations that are concise, compelling, and visually attractive.

Time Study

This research is a time study that provides members an understanding of the usage of their critical time, essentially, where you think you spend your time is different from where you actually spend your time.

Tech Trends Planning + CIO Report

The yearly CIO survey will be Info-Tech's chance to poll CIOs to gain a view of the challenges they expect to have in the coming year, technologies they feel are worth exploring, priority initiatives they will be working on, expected IT budget evolution, most valuable IT services, and pressing talent priorities.

Industry-focused research projects in the quarter ahead

Deep Industry Research

Supply Chain-as-a-Service

This research will provide a comprehensive understanding of how best-in-class businesses are managing greater supply chain complexity as well as the strategies and technology tactics to enable supply chain services responsiveness.

Support High-Performance Computing for Academic Research

This output will aid IT in understanding how it can best support universities for high-performance computing clusters for processing intensive research projects.

Technology Review on Modern Front Ends That Connect to Legacy Core Banking Platforms

It has become challenging for members from the banking industry to compete and deliver elevated customer experiences through their online and mobile offerings as their legacy core banking platforms were not designed to deliver these elevated experiences. This output will look at the vendors in the market and assess their high-level suitability for integration with their legacy core.

The Future of Wholesale & Distribution

This research will focus on reimagining the wholesale distribution center of the future by revisiting infrastructure components and costs with industry best practices and allowing for integration into the IT strategic plan.

The New Power of Accountable Care Organizations

This research will assist technology healthcare leaders in driving increased collaboration and investment away from fee-for-service to value-based healthcare.

Build Business-Aligned Privacy Programs for Healthcare Providers

This research aims to supply healthcare providers a curated guideline for building a business-aligned privacy program.

Create a Business Continuity Plan for Healthcare

This research will provide a curated framework for the creation of a BCP for healthcare members.

Create a Business Continuity Plan for Higher Education

This research will provide a curated framework for the creation of a BCP for higher education members.

Create a Business Continuity Plan for Manufacturing

This research will provide a curated framework for the creation of a BCP for manufacturing members.

Determine the Benefits of Centralization of IT in Education

This research will help education members understand the benefits of centralization of IT and whether that is the correct strategic decision for them.

Ensure Education Leadership Includes the CIO’s Perspective (K-12)

This research aims to aid the CIO in improving their respective influence on the institutional strategy.

(VAR) First 100 Days as a Virtual CIO

This output will boost the VAR offering to provide more feedback and demonstrate progress on a more regular basis.

GIS Strategy

This output will provide a broad scan of utility trends in utilities GIS practice, use cases (including outage management), and provide best practices for developing an all-encompassing GIS strategy.

Government IT Preparedness: A Guide for Government IT Leaders in Times of Crisis

A comprehensive guide designed to help government IT leaders navigate and manage crises effectively. The guide focuses on the importance of preparedness, which is the ability to anticipate, adapt, and recover from unexpected disruptions (e.g., strikes) or natural disasters (e.g., floods).

Identifying the Impact of Technical Debt on Government Department/Agency IT Operations

Technical debt can impact government department/agency IT operations in a variety of ways, such as reduced system performance, increased downtime, and increased maintenance costs. This output will provide technical debt case studies, a technical debt assessment framework, and a technical debt toolkit.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Police Work

This research will give a comprehensive understanding of the impact of AI on police work by providing case studies, policy recommendations, and training materials.

Implement Cloud Solutions in Public Health

This research will provide public health members with a perspective that will allow them to implement cloud solutions.

Implement Cloud Solutions in the Federal Government

This research will provide federal government members with a perspective that will allow them to implement cloud solutions.

Improve the Nonprofit Constituent Experience

This project will focus on identifying areas of improvement in driving constituent engagement (increasing the number and depth of interactions).

Leverage Insurtech Innovations (in the Areas of GenAI, ML, Blockchain, Digital Distribution Channels, etc.)

This research will assist insurance members looking to leverage Insuretech innovations capabilities by providing a view of the capabilities and resources available in the marketplace.

Intelligent Automation in Manufacturing

This research will provide comprehensive evaluation criteria for Intelligent Automation software selection.

Legacy Apps Modernization/Modernize Your Applications in Insurance

This research will provide insurance members with a perspective on the modernization of legacy applications.

Legacy Apps Modernization/Modernize Your Applications in Higher Education

This research will provide higher education members with a perspective on the modernization of legacy applications.

Level 2 Reference Architecture in Insurance

This research will focus on providing Level 2 Reference Architecture for our insurance members.

Improve Visibility via Logistics Visibility Systems

This project will provide our members greater visibility into what, who, and how products are moving from start to finish and returning via more rigorous use of their visibility and digital freight solutions.

Manufacturing Digital Twinning, Valuable Beyond Product Design

This research will provide a comprehensive understanding of the impact and areas of opportunity digital twinning can provide in manufacturing.

Operational Efficiency Through Predictive Maintenance

This output will aid manufacturing and logistics companies in driving more toward predictive maintenance.

Policy Administration Tech solutions

This research will highlight disruption, opportunities, and vendor solutions for claims and underwriting areas of businesses.

First 100 Days to Make the MSP Customer Onboarding Experience Successful

This research will provide key factors to improve customer onboarding based on industry best practices.

Select a Donor Management System

This research will assist members in identifying better technology for supporting fundraising opportunities.

The Potential Financial Benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare organizations increasingly adopt AI technologies to improve their operations and patient outcomes. However, there is a lack of understanding of the potential financial benefits of AI in healthcare settings. This research will explore the impact of AI on key financial metrics such as revenue growth, profit margins, and return on investment in healthcare organizations in North America and New Zealand.

The State of the Utility Work and Asset Management (EAM)

Work and asset management (EAM) practices can vary in maturity levels across different utility organizations and sectors. This output will produce a market trends analysis to assist organizations in improving their maturity level in this area. It will also provide recommendations based on best practices.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to Improve Population Health Outcomes

This research will focus on the use of AI and ML in population health management and will cover topics such as data privacy and security, data governance, and ethical considerations.

Virtual Health Playbook (Refresh)

This research will revisit our existing Virtual Health Playbook and update the output to reflect more detail as requested by our members.

How to Utilize and Deploy AI/ML for Small and Medium-Sized Financial Institutions

Practical research outputs via AI/ML methodologies and implementation guidelines to aid small and medium financial institutions.

AI/ML Use Cases in Gaming & Hospitality

Detailed research output that highlights different use cases and examples of AI and ML in the gaming and hospitality industry.

ALSD Benchmarking Report

This report is in partnership with the Association of Luxury Suite Directors (ALSD).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Government Digital Services

This research will provide a leading practices framework, an AI readiness assessment, AI use case library, AI implementation guide, and AI training materials for the use of our government digital services members.

Assessing the Cost Impact of Migrating Legacy Systems to the Cloud

Migrating systems that are not cloud compatible to the cloud can be costly and time-consuming. This research will involve identifying the costs associated with migrating legacy systems, such as data migration, software upgrades, and training, and developing a framework for assessing the cost impact of cloud migration.

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