In an interview at Big Data LDN, Abhas Ricky, Cloudera‘s managing director, global head — strategy and transformation, explained to Information Age the main pain points impacting the CIO based on his conversations with customers.

1. Security and governance

The number one paint point for CIOs is security and governance, according to Ricky. “The role of IT is changing,” he said. “In the past, the department was doing everything, but today they’re becoming the provider of providers. Why? Because the cloud providers can go straight to lines of businesses, so somebody’s got to govern them, somebody has going to enforce the uniform layers of governance across the datasets. That’s what IT are doing naturally and security and governance is very key to them.”

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2. Change management

The second biggest pain point for CIOs, Ricky suggested, is change management. This is because IT is not just about technology, but about people and culture as well.

“They have to upscale their own people and they have to sell that internally, and a lot of them don’t have the ammunition to do that, because they don’t have a proper understanding of the business value attached to those projects,” continued Ricky.

“They don’t have a proper understanding of the business outcomes attached to specific spend and this needs to change.”

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3. Prioritise and optimise use cases

The final pain point for the CIO is how to prioritise and optimise various use cases across the technology stack.

Ricky explained: “There’s always a new shiny object, which will be better, faster and cheaper. There’s always this ever increasing asks from lines of business to deliver yesterday, without actually understanding what it takes on the other side to do that. And that causes a lot of pain in the system and reliance on outside vendors and outsourcing etcetera.

“The natural answer to handling these business demands is we don’t have the capabilities, let’s outsource it. This ends up with cost overruns, which ends up with you building up capability where the knowledge wasn’t transferred in-house and there’s no continuity.”