Harvey Nash CIO Survey : generate growth through new technologies without losing focus on security & compliance

The Global CIO survey from Harvey Nash, with more than 2,000 participants,  highlights and reinforces some trends that are very relevant to Insurance professionals looking at technology opportunities:

1. Confirmation that digital opportunities are primarily growth opportunities : The majority of CIO’s (56%) are focused on projects that make money rather than save money and 71% believe their organisations need to embrace new technology otherwise they will lose market share
2. Trends in demand for technology skills reinforce the importance of mobile, customer focus and social media. See table 2 , extracted from the report below. Global CIOs are actively promoting the development of mobile phone and tablet applications for their organisation; close to 60% say they are ‘active’ while 20 percent are ‘very’ active . More than one in ten global CIO’s (11%) are also ‘very’ active in promoting social media and search engine optimisation strategies. The IT department and the Marketing department share responsibility for digital media; 43% of CIO’s claim this to be the case compared to ten percent of global CIOs who have full control over the role of digital in their organisation. A further 37% of CIO’s state that the Marketing department probably has more influence in the digital media strategy. Clearly successful digital marketing strategies will require cross functional co-operation – and probably new thinking in terms of organisational structures and the skills required to be successful in this area.

3. Security and compliance remain issues : the survey reports 16% of all global CIO’s claim their organisation is not well positioned to manage current and future regulations that are placed on them (up from 11% from the 2011 survey). For insurance companies security and compliance issues are clearly even more of a challenge – and this spotlights the needs for financial companies to become more customer centric and embrace new technologies at the same time a ensuring security and compliance requirements are addressed. Organisations that focus on either one at the expense of the other are less likely to be successful than those that embrace both.

Many thanks to Marc-Karim Baloch,  Associate Director at Harvey Nash, based in Hong Kong for bringing this survey to my attention. It will be interesting to see if the trends identified are confirmed by the 2013 survey.

Download the survey results here