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Budgets, talent pipelines, cyberthreats—there’s no shortage of challenges facing tech leaders and their teams now and in the near future. And as the pandemic has shown, tech leaders and their teams are often called on to provide needed solutions for industries and communities at the drop of a hat.
However, as most tech professionals know, it’s not always about having all the answers, it’s about prioritizing the most pressing issues. Below, 12 tech industry leaders from Forbes Technology Council discuss the most pressing challenges that tech leaders and their teams face today and in the near future.
1. Adapting To Customer Changes
In today’s challenging environment, tech teams are facing hurdles in product focus, budgets, timelines and team dynamics. The greatest difficulty for all tech teams will be to adapt to how their customers are changing. The most successful tech companies understand their customers’ needs, and we’ve never seen such an aggregate change in customers’ buying habits, needs and retention as we are seeing today. - Russell P Reeder, Infrascale
2. Onboarding New Tech And Processes
Because of Covid-19, many companies have had to accelerate the shift to digital tools for remote collaboration. Quickly onboarding new technologies and processes creates growing pains that you need to make sure are addressed before they hinder productivity and lead to disgruntled employees. The best way to do this is by taking small steps where possible and bringing your team along on the journey. - Saar Yoskovitz, Augury
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3. Automating Security Detection And Response
Organizations should prioritize reinvesting in their security teams. For years now, we have lived in an age of alert overload, with security and response teams overwhelmed by the data points they receive. All too often, events slip through the defensive net. To combat this, organizations need a foundation of behavioral analytics that can help detect attacks and automate incident response. - Stephen Moore, Exabeam
4. Educating Employees About Cyberthreats
Enabling employees to work from anywhere, but securely, will be a big challenge. Research shows that 48% of employees are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home. As remote working becomes the norm, tech teams must educate employees on threats like phishing and adopt new policies and solutions that can protect data from risky work-from-home behaviors and incidents of human error. - Edward Bishop, Tessian
5. Delivering Better Software At Scale
Roughly $300 billion is lost every year in software development productivity as a result of a lack of access to senior talent and complex software systems. This is impacting technical leaders and their businesses dramatically by increasing the marginal cost of software delivery. Tech leaders are faced with a major challenge in understanding how automation can enable their teams to deliver better software at scale. - Kyle Campbell, CTO.ai
6. Budget Constraints Causing Automation Delays
Budget constraints are causing delays in automation projects, which in turn causes employees (on potentially downsized teams) to take on more day-to-day tasks. This occupies mind space and reduces the ability to deliver business value. Companies need to focus on two things: ruthless prioritization of high-value automation use cases and pragmatic application of the right AI method(s) to realize value. - Ram Chakravarti, BMC Software
7. Tech Teams’ Complacency
The biggest challenge facing tech teams is complacency. Technology is growing at an exponential rate, and if your teams do not stay on top of the latest tools and techniques, your organization will lose its competitive advantage. Keeping abreast of emerging technologies and creating prototypes will ensure that you are ahead of the curve and will advise your customers about adopting them. - Swathi Young, Integrity Management Systems Inc.
8. Misaligned Technology Expectations
Expectation alignment is the single biggest problem in technology organizations and their relationships with business. If expectations are not aligned, it causes frustration and budget constraints and exposes unintended risk. When IT can focus on establishing business expectations of technology, things like budgets, projects, talent, etc. all become easier to tackle, as you have a partner in business. - Robert Chapman, 101 Solutions
9. Obsolescence
Obsolescence is the biggest threat to tech leaders. Given all that is available on demand thanks to the cloud, most tech leaders could soon find themselves being rendered redundant. The only way to remain relevant is to keep learning—especially in light of all the new talent that keeps coming into the workforce. We are only as good as the value we can bring to any conversation. Otherwise, we are only overhead. - Samiran Ghosh, Rockmetric
10. Sourcing And Retaining IT Talent
Sourcing, hiring and retaining top IT talent will always be a major challenge in the IT industry, especially for companies that limit their teams to the local talent pool. Embracing remote methodologies and staff augmentation strategies can change this. I’m certain we will be seeing many more extended teams of expert developers in the near future. - Nacho De Marco, BairesDev
11. Keeping A Secure Work Environment
With the new norm of remote work, the biggest challenge facing tech teams today is how to maintain a productive and secure work environment. Recent major hacks, such as that of Twitter, have proven how unsecure remote work can be. Using dedicated wireless broadband on top of security tools (like virtual private networks, IP security and two-factor authentication) can help tech teams avoid online vulnerabilities while working remotely. - Ahmad (Al) Fares, Celitech Inc.
12. Achieving Balance Between Routine And Long-Term Tasks
The biggest challenge is to achieve a healthy balance between routine tasks and long-term strategic initiatives. Cyberthreats, technologies and business objectives are changing, and to keep up with the competition and an evolving threat landscape, tech leaders must ensure that strategic tasks are not buried under routines. It requires continuous communication with management and a willingness to learn. - Ilia Sotnikov, Netwrix
