CEO Concerns 2015

1. Human capital planned responses

1 Improve leadership development programs
2 Raise employee engagement
3 Increase efforts to retain critical talent
4 Provide employee training and development
5 Improve corporate brand and employee value propositions to attract talent

2. Innovation planned responses

1 Create culture of innovation by promoting and rewarding entrepreneurship and risk taking
2 Apply new technologies (product, process, information, etc.)
3 Change business model
4 Pursue open innovation concepts
5 Find, engage, and incentivize key talent for innovation

3. Customer relationships planned responses

1 Sharpen understanding of customer/client needs
2 Enhance quality of products/services
3 Engage personally with key customers/clients
4 Increase speed of products and services to market
5 Tailor marketing, promotion, and communications campaigns to key customer needs

4. Operational excellence planned responses

1 Improve our organizational agility/flexibility
2 Improve performance and accountability of middle management
3 Seek better alignment between strategy, objectives and organizational capabilities
4 Raise employee engagement to drive productivity
5 Improve performance and accountability of senior management

5. Global/International expansion planned responses

1 Acquire companies in target geographic markets
2 Enter new geographic markets with existing products/services
3 Tailor marketing and communication messages to local market
4 Develop local management talent for top roles
5 Introduce new localized products/services for customers/clients in new geographic
markets

CFO Concerns 2015

Measuring and monitoring business performance

Out of those CFOs that were part of the IBM survey, only 47% felt that they were conducting
effective methods to measure and monitor their business performance. CFOs who were classified
as Value Integrators by IBM were often ahead of their rivals due to the fact that they were bringing
together information from the entire organisation and could then plan, budget, forecast and hone
any minor issues in each routine financial process.
This can be a tough call for SME CFOs as they may not have adequate internal resources to
effectively stay on top of all the information generated. External consultants can help here by
providing technology and specialist expertise to analyse the data that the business receives more
effectively. This enables decisions to be made more quickly and help to gain a competitive
advantage. The data can also be used to predict future challenges or opportunities earlier.

Providing strategic inputs into enterprise strategy

Another key challenge is to use business performance data to tailor an appropriate strategy. This can
be the difference between marginal profits and substantial profits. The IBM report identified a
subset of the Value Integrators known as the Performance Accelerators who can offer an even
more refined approach.
Performance Accelerators have double the efficiency of integrating enterprise-wide information
than the other Value Integrators. They are different from the other Value Integrators as they are
notably cogent when creating business insights. These insights are then used to match
complementary departments and remove any overlapping work.
Again SME CFOs overseeing a multitude of departments but with less manpower than large
corporates can benefit from expert assistance in standardising financial information and interpreting
financial data produced by disparate parts of the business. This can aid their insight into the entire
business and where its efficiencies and inefficiencies lie.

Developing talent in the finance organisation

Another core issue facing CFOs is to ensure that they develop talent in their organisation. Bill
Fuessler, a Partner at IBM, stated that the key competencies that CFOs look for when assembling
their teams do not perfectly match the accounting and finance curriculum. While a reformed
curriculum would help, Fuessler believes that some of these gaps in skill sets can be filled by
businesses having their Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) work more closely with their CFO.
This can lead to a clearer understanding of what customers want (from the CMO) whilst the CFO
offers different alternatives to solve business questions. The CFOs and their staff benefit from a
wider understanding of the clients needs and how their business fits into the market, while the
CMOs and their staff develop their financial and analytical skills. This leads to a more dynamic
workforce.
CIO Concerns 2015

10. Customer Relationship Management

Through proper CRM strategies, state governments hope to build customer confidence in
specific agencies. While ranked No. 10 as a priority here, this is typically the top CIO
priority within corporations many of which are striving to embrace the age of the
customer.
9. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
Big once in a lifetime events like Hurricane Sandy knocked a lot of towns and cities offline
back in 2012. But the once in a lifetime disasters are seemingly more commonplace these
days. As a result, governments are drawing up disaster recovery plans that allow employees to
work anywhere during the recovery process. The plans lean heavily on cloud services, wireless
and remote access, and more.
8. Mobility
This spans devices, applications, policy issues, wireless infrastructure and the ongoing BYOD
(Bring Your Own Device) wave. Recent Gartner research suggests that its less expensive for IT
departments to support tablets that employees own, rather than buying tablets outright for
employees. That said, IT leaders must have firm but reasonable mobile use policies in place.
7. Strategic IT Planning
Much like the alignment of business and IT, government organizations must align IT with the
governors policy agenda. Sometimes, government goals are in conflict with one another. For
instance, governments are striving to launch self-service portals for citizens, but at the same
time the IT departments must ensure security for increasingly open networks and applications.
6. Talent Management
In addition to attracting, developing and retaining IT personnel, state governments have to deal
with a stark reality: Thousands of aging IT pros are set to retire in the coming years, taking
considerable knowledge with them out the door. States must somehow capture and retain that
knowledge even as employees retire.
5. Budget and Cost Control
Tight IT budgets are nothing new at the state level. A range of steps (data center consolidation,
cloud and mobile services) could help to drive costs down. Open standards like Linux also help.
As do aggressive vendor competition, including Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps for
government users.
4. Broadband, Wireless Connectivity
This involves strengthening statewide connectivity beyond schools and public facilities. WiFi
has increasingly become a base-level utility or infrastructure expectation, similar to reliable
roads and highways.
3. Consolidation, Optimization
At a base level, servers, storage and networking are coming together in converged data center
systems. Some more aggressive states may evaluate software defined data centers (SDDC),
where virtualization stretches from servers to networks and storage. But its early in the SDDC
game.
2. Cloud Services
This stretches from cloud strategy to proper selection of service and deployment models. State
governments are weighing security, privacy and data ownership as they navigate public cloud,
private cloud and on-premises options.
1. Security
This covers everything from risk assessment and governance to security frameworks, data
protection, training and awareness, and mitigating insider threats. Also, state governments are
trying to determine what constitutes due care or reasonable efforts on security.