Featuring:

Brian Hopkins, VP and Principal Analyst

Show Notes:

When the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic started hitting this spring, a Forrester survey found that one priority emerged quickly: digital transformation. In this episode of What It Means, VP and Principal Analyst Brian Hopkins discusses the role reducing technical debt has in helping firms free up budget to accelerate their digital plans.

What changed during the pandemic for CIOs? Firms that were using short-term digital fixes with a limited budget (“shoestring and bubble gum”) made major leaps forward because their organizations allocated more budget to digital transformation goals. Hopkins points to one example of an airline that quickly rolled out robotic process automation (RPA) to handle the massive influx of flight changes that came about during the pandemic.

Hopkins says in the next three years the more advanced and prepared firms will start focusing on retiring older technology and upgrading their core tech stack to prepare for the future. “One of the things that’s on the CIO’s mind is what does the future look like and how do we operate in the future?” says Hopkins. That can be anything from global trade tensions to consumer buying trends, driving firms to think more locally and CIOs to think about technology investment in the medium-term.

Hopkins also discusses how new technologies like Kubernetes, edge computing, and low code are helping organizations build the technical base for new levels of innovation never imagined before.