3 ways CIOs should drive the future of work

“Who owns and oversees employee experience and the future of work at your organization” is a question I’ve been asking CIOs and IT leaders a lot of late. The ensuing conversation usually reveals a telling disconnect that CIOs should remedy for the health of their companies.

Most IT leaders pause before responding to this question. Some go on to describe hybrid work plans,  which is one aspect of the future of work, but it’s not the complete scope. To align on terminology, I share Gartner’s definition, “The future of work describes changes in how work will get done over the next decade, influenced by technological, generational, and social shifts,” and then ask them to reconsider this greater scope.

After another pause, some will say there isn’t ownership around this agenda. Others say human resources leads the future of work considerations for the enterprise, and department leaders own it for their teams. This may be so, but it isn’t a recipe for ensuring long-term organizational success.

The CIO as a key driver for the future of work

Many CIOs will say IT is involved in laying the foundation for the future of work at their organizations, but usually in a supporting role. Helping departments with automations is one area where CIOs consider IT to be a driver. Or when a department procures new technology, an implementation requires IT’s assistance, or when integration is needed. 

But taking this kind of butler approach to the organization’s future of work mission and waiting for business drivers can be shortsighted. CIOs should take more of a leadership role, especially when future of work initiatives can be a digital transformation force multiplier.

CIOs have the opportunity to improve their organization’s competitiveness, promote innovation capabilities, and catalyze culture change by driving blue-sky thinking around how technological shifts will transform employee responsibilities and experiences. Here are three technology areas CIOs should focus on.

1. Transform knowledge management with generative AI

ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI have generated a storm of consumer interest that is carrying over into the enterprise. Many marketing departments are embracing content generation, image creation, and video editing to scale their workflows, while Microsoft added ChatGPT capabilities to its office suite, and Google is adding generative AI tools across Workspace.

“Generative AI is reimagining the future of work, from the content we write to the creative we use and how we converse with each other,” says Yishay Carmiel, CEO of Meaning. “While early challenges with accuracy and credibility remain a barrier to entry, generative tech is still proving valuable for enterprises producing content and uncovering valuable information quickly and at scale.”

One area I expect generative AI to impact the future of work significantly is knowledge management and enterprise search experiences. I expect we’ll see the consumerization of search and knowledge management over the next decade, driven by generative and conversational AI capabilities. 

Today, most enterprises create, store, and search content across a breadth of tools, including CRMs, CMSes, ecommerce platforms, office suites, and collaboration tools. Employees search for content using primitive keyword search boxes instead of natural language processing and conversational AI capabilities. These capabilities are ripe for transformation, and AI search is a force multiplier when it centralizes information access, addresses tribal knowledge risks, and personalizes employee experiences. 

2. Drive self-service capabilities with no-code tech

The first no-code tools for building web applications became available over two decades ago. Today, most organizations use a mix of low-code and no-code tools to build applications, and many support citizen development performed by non-IT employees.

No-code isn’t just for developing apps, as many organizations use no-code self-service business intelligence tools such as Power BI and Tableau to enable a data-driven organization and reduce the reliance on operational spreadsheets. There are also no-code data prep, automation, and integration tools used by marketing, operations, and finance teams with staff and skills to implement technology solutions with little or no IT assistance.

CIOs should embrace no-code and citizen development as a key future of work strategy. The reality is that IT is always understaffed, and many people entering the workplace have the sufficient technical acumen to work with no-code technologies.

Empowering employees with no-code technologies can drive a culture transformation when CIOs drive the initiative and IT provides support services. Instead of IT saying “no” or having staff waiting for IT’s help, departments have technologies to drive their agendas.

What does it mean to drive self-service capabilities? CIOs should define a citizen development governance model and govern citizen data science so that no-code apps and dashboards developed today don’t become tomorrow’s technical debt. Disciplines such as identifying requirements, versioning applications, testing functionality, establishing security access roles, documenting releases, reusing capabilities, and defining standards are all important whether an app is developed with code, low-code, or no-code. 

3. Accelerate decision-making with hyperautomation and real-time analytics

If self-service business intelligence and data catalogs helped democratize data, then hyperautomation and real-time analytics will enable CIOs to accelerate smarter decision-making.

Large enterprises have transformed from batch data processing, where executives review weekly and monthly reports to more real-time analytics. In addition, CIOs have scaled beyond using robotic process automation (RPA) on tasks and workflows and now focus on hyperautomation, the integration of automation, low-code, and machine learning capabilities to enable smarter decision-making.

These technologies and capabilities are mainstream, and more small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can no longer afford to be laggards in driving intelligent automation.

Tom Sagi, co-founder and CEO of Hourly.io, says, “As the Federal Reserve continues to increase interest rates, small and medium businesses will continue to look for ways to save money this year. The future of work for SMBs will be driven by their ability to adopt new technologies like automation and real-time analytics and will be a key driver of innovation for SMBs focused on saving time and money.”

Here, opportunities include empowering the finance organization with real-time analytics capabilities or using hyperautomation to improve field operation’s resource scheduling.

But the key opportunity for CIOs is to use these technologies as building blocks by asking, “How can we reimagine workflow X by integrating automation, real-time analytics, machine learning, and low-code capabilities?”

CIOs should become drivers of the future of work, starting with blue-sky thinking, implementing radically reinvented workflows, and focusing on employee experiences.