On the leadership front, 70 percent of respondents say they have a Chief Data Officer (CDO) in place. The CDO often has a broad role encompassing privacy and compliance, customer data, and intellectual property. But our research shows that CDOs can play a valuable role liaising between the business and IT to ensure that the organisation gets full value from operational data. Organisations with a CDO say they have allocated a greater percentage of IT budget to operational initiatives (31 percent vs 15 percent for those who have no plans to appoint a CDO). And they are more likely to “heavily” use IT data for business decision-making (46 percent vs 31 percent). A CDO can also partner with the CIO to help bring new roles and disciplines to IT teams. For example, organisations with a CDO employed on average 55 data scientists; it fell to 36 in those with no plans to hire a CDO. As new technologies continue to disrupt familiar ways of working, these evolving roles will be critical to the future of IT operations.
Forty-two percent of our respondents believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the biggest disruption to their automated operations in the future (see Figure 6). Already, 51 percent use AI for automation to some degree, with another 38 percent planning to do so in the next 12 months. Organisations with a CDO in place are more likely to use AI. With the speed, complexity, and sheer size of the data sets being gathered from IT infrastructures, static business rules and manual data processing will be unworkable. AI is the answer. Cognitive systems see patterns in data that humans cannot, at speed, and economically at scale. The insights and recommendations from AI systems can inform human decision-making, or AI systems can be trusted to make autonomous decisions. The use cases are innumerable. For example, service providers can use predictive models built on AI and machine learning (ML) not just to track customer churn rates on aggregate, but to monitor how micro-segments of customers use different services, and adapt everything from traffic prioritisation to marketing messages to maximise retention and lifetime value for each individual.