New IDC Study: Advice for CIOs to Address Inflation and Staffing Challenges

IDC recently surveyed CIOs for the sixth time this year in their Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey to understand the trends and issues facing IT departments. The results? Increasing inflationary impacts, ongoing supply chain issues, a global talent shortage and increased business demand for technology solutions are creating a perfect storm of cost and resource pressures. As if every dollar wasn’t already strategically allocated.

For SAP Manufacturers, IT investment and resourcing must be balanced across SAP S/4HANA migration, maintenance of existing systems, upgrades to key front-end systems like customer portals, and more.

More than two-third of respondents felt inflation would have no significant impact on IT spend across all major categories. However, they acknowledge that projects are being delayed or impacted by resourcing challenges. Now, more than ever, strategic outsourcing and business-driven IT investments are critical. The ability to understand the downstream impacts of a seemingly simple investment is pushing CIOs to rethink traditional IT investment models.

Beyond the Pandemic and Inflation

The role of the CIO has been shifting, hastened by the pandemic. “The Covid-19 pandemic has supercharged the role of Chief Information Officers, accelerating a shift from backroom technicians to front-office decision makers, as companies’ operations are increasingly shaped by technology,” cited a September 2021 Wall Street Journal article.

CIOs, equal parts business leader and technical guru, are making decisions not just on where to invest resources but how to invest them. Building SAP integrations can be time consuming, resource intensive, and costly and maintaining them adds to the complexity. Wouldn’t it be smarter to outsource that to a trust partner and use your limited internal resources to support the business in ways that only they can?

Integration Partners and PIPs 

The IDC CIO survey reveals the top 3 most difficult positions to hire include:

• AI & Data Strategy
• Software
• IT Ops

For SAP-based Manufacturers, adding SAP skills to that mix add even more challenges to hiring. To avoid delaying business-critical projects further, CIOs must look to partners and PIPs for speed, scale, and impact.

Going forward, enterprise-grade solutions must be nearly plug-and-play simple, even when complex ERPs like SAP ECC or SAP S4/HANA are involved. Packaged Integration Processes (PIPs) are a key part of that but equally important is finding partners that make complex SAP integrations simple–like enosix.

Let’s talk about using the enosix purpose-built framework to speed your SAP integration projects forward while minimizing the lift on your internal IT teams. enosix helps you, and your teams, work smarter, not harder.