New year’s resolutions help you reflect on the past and think about some
objectives and changes you want for the upcoming year. I think they are
useful tools for self-reflection, even if many of us forget about them once
the pressures of the new year take over our days and cloud our longer-term
thinking.
This year is a little hard to figure out with the wake of the pandemic
behind us, the threat of a recession looming, and the need to drive
transformative change growing exponentially over time. Just look at
Southwest Airlines’ failure
during the holiday week for an example of an enterprise that didn’t
transform fast enough, and maybe others like
Meta’s overdrive to the metaverse
and arguably risking today’s business. CIOs and CDOs (both chief digital
officers and chief data officers) are facing a challenging year.
It won’t be easy to forecast and read the tea leaves this year.
Digital Trailblazers
will need to drive their organizations while also considering how to
recession-proof their digital transformation strategies.
Do you need to author your own resolutions, or can you learn from others? I
believe in the latter, so this year, I reached out to influencers in my
network to share a resolution. You’ll find my resolution at the end.
-
Protect revenue with AIOps: “Savvy CIOs will use technology to
deliver extraordinary customer experiences in 2023 and help their
organizations protect revenue. AI that can prevent and resolve outages
at scale will be a key part of those CIOs’ arsenals.” – Mohan Kompella,
VP of product marketing at
BigPanda -
Improve service and team health: “Stop worrying about vanity
metrics like how many nines your service is available. Resolve to set
well-defined, realistic reliability and performance targets at the
individual service level and use automation to ensure service health and
avoid team overload.” – Kit Merker, chief growth officer,
Nobl9 -
Accelerate customer-driven innovation: “My entire career has been
in customer-facing roles, even when I was CIO at Salesforce. I’m coming
into this year as the new CEO of Propel Software, and my goal is to
accelerate our pace of innovation so our employees, customers, and
stakeholders can be more successful tomorrow than they are today. Our
next chapter is about taking a maniacal customer focus and scaling it so
we can serve thousands more effectively and efficiently.” – Ross
Meyercord, CEO of Propel Software -
Accelerate hybrid working: “Make this the year you embrace the
global technology revolution: remote work, automation, and diverse
teams. Go beyond the limits of your city, your existing installed
capacity, and the local talent. Don’t let limitations of the past be the
stopper of your best ideas!” – Arturo Garcia, CEO,
DNAMIC -
Embrace low-code solutions: “In 2023, IT leaders will have to
figure out ways to do more with less, which will require new solutions.
To tackle this challenge, IT leaders should resolve to embrace
high-performance low-code tools. This will help meet critical business
needs amidst the increasingly fast-paced innovation and complexity
demands, improve developer productivity while reducing developer
frustration, and deliver technology solutions customers expect.” –
Patrick Jean, CTO,
OutSystems -
Integrate customer with employee experiences: “Many companies
have spent the past few years fine-tuning their internal processes. This
year, I anticipate that organizations will spend more effort and budget
connecting internal backend business processes with external
customer-facing processes to reduce the chaos of managing interactions
across multiple channels for customers and businesses.” – Stanley Huang,
co-founder and CTO at
Moxo -
Overcome customer experience bottlenecks: To deliver top-notch
customer experience and reinvent offerings, overcome three hurdles: (1)
lack of contextual engagement, (2) pervasive information silos, and (3)
inordinately high IT dependency. These bottlenecks inadvertently lead to
higher turnaround time for customer service, mishandling customer
complaints, error-prone processing, growing operational costs, and
dwindling customer loyalty. Anurag Shah, VP and head of products and
solutions at
Newgen -
Shift-left and double-down continuous testing: “As developers,
engineers, and QA professionals increasingly prioritize mobile
experiences, IT teams need to be laser-focused on developing quality
mobile apps and features while also resolving app quality issues across
the SDLC. Shifting test left and right throughout the development
lifecycle by employing a devops test toolchain will facilitate a better
developer experience while also reducing risk and increasing ROI.” –
Marcus Merrell, VP of technology strategy at
Sauce Labs -
Tame infrastructure chaos: “Due to the increasing complexity of
infrastructure, my team’s resolution for 2023 is to help businesses tame
the chaos of infrastructure. IT and DevOps teams can deploy and manage
environments more easily, businesses have better visibility and
understanding of costs, and developers can increase productivity.” –
Edan Evantal, CTO of
Quali -
Expand Reliability Mindsets to Business Teams: “With this new
socio-technical definition of reliability, we predict teams entirely
outside of engineering will prioritize it in their process and culture.
Consider a customer-facing team, like sales. When landing new clients,
the team must ensure continuity even if people are out of the office.
They need consistency in their messaging and engagement to prevent any
deals from falling through the cracks. They must manage unplanned work
interfering with planned work, just like engineers dealing with
incidents. The reliability mindset, along with processes and tooling, is
the best way for these teams to uplevel these skills.” – Jim Gochee, CEO
of Blameless -
Accelerate to data lakes: “Enterprise adoption rates of lakehouse
technologies are skyrocketing. We’re seeing lots of movement in
companies embracing open source, file and table formats. Will data
warehouses go away in a year? We can’t say yes for sure, but trends are
pointing in that direction.” – Tomer Shiran, co-founder and CPO,
Dremio -
Prioritize Your Day: “Do not succumb to the siren songs of ‘easy
wins’ or ‘urgent matters.’ Instead, I will focus on what’s important. I
will organize my schedule so I can do something important every day.” –
co-founder of
Semaphore CI/CD
and RenderedText. -
Focus on a healthy lifestyle: “My 2023 resolution is a
health conscience one and will align with the seasons. My resolution is
no carbs or sugar (including alcoholic beverages) after sunset – so
after around 8 pm during the summer and 5 pm in the winter. If I decide
to partake, I must do ten pushups before each drink post-sunset.”
– Kashyap Deorah, CEO of
HyperTrack -
Commit to lifelong learning: “Every day, write a little, read
more, and invest even more efforts to reach out to people and learn from
them. Ask questions, refine your perspective on how you should spend
your day, and tune your longer-term vision.” – Isaac Sacolick, President
of StarCIO and author of
Digital Trailblazer,
Driving Digital, and this blog,
Social, Agile, and Transformation.
Also, see my latest post on
enlightening books to read in 2023
and join the
community of Digital Trailblazers.
Join the Digital Trailblazer Community
At the end of every chapter in
Digital Trailblazer, find the URL to
get access to my community and supplementary content for aspiring
transformation leaders.
The Digital Trailblazer Community is free for a
limited time, so I hope you’ll read the book and
join us!
