Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Millennial Views on Digital Transformation

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Millennial Views on Digital Transformation In 2016, millennial IT professionals aren’t working in back offices. Increasingly, they are finding themselves in the CIO role. I chatted with IDC’s Christopher Chute, who is vice president of the SMB Cloud and Mobility Practice, about his recent studyassessing how millennial CIOs are investing in digital transformation. Here’s a recap of our conversation. Chris, what does digital transformation mean to millennial CIOs? Cloud and mobile-enabled workplaces, or something else? That’s a big part of it. Millennial-aged midmarket CIOs interpret the digital transformation (DX) end-state as a cloud and mobile-first workplace revolving around modernized endpoints or devices, Internet of Things enablement, and a streamlined back office that outsources functions like printing. Basically, they want to IT-ify all of their business processes where it makes sense. What were the biggest “AH HAs?” Anything you weren’t expecting? Across every spending priority, executive-level millennials are adopting cloud-based technologies more rapidly than baby boomer and Gen X CIOs. This generation is having a profound impact on the transition from client server to SaaS (software-as-a-service) on millions of individual devices including notebooks and phablets. However, millennial CIOs are at the helm of mature IT infrastructures in which onsite and cloud systems are both supported â€" a hybrid approach. Millennial CIOs are prioritizing Windows 10 alongside mobile computing, and for now, they are erring on the side of keeping critical data on in-house servers while moving applications to the cloud. It was surprising to us that millennials had moved into these CIO roles so quickly. When thinking about their customers, IT suppliers really need to factor in the age dimension. How are millennial CIOs saving their organizations money with the hybrid approach? Millennials are ahead of the market curve because they’ve moved the back office into the cloud. Instead of the organization hiring more people, IT buys a set of cloud services that makes existing office managers in HR and finance more productive. Millennial CIOs are also vigilant about auditing the existing infrastructure to see what onsite capabilities are really needed. For the rest of the interview, have a look at QuickBases Fast Track blog.