As per the key finding by Rakuten India’s sixth sense report, the nature of digital transformation has evolved in the post pandemic world of work. The report, which counts responders from 500 technology companies in India and 51% of them being women, reiterates digital technology’ strategic importance as a quintessential component in the business. 90% CIOs agree with the finding, emphasising that it is not just a source of cost efficiencies and they see the role of Digital Transformation leader expanding in future.

77% of CIO’s said that they are increasingly embracing SaaS solutions to cater to specific functionalities as it will help them bring new capabilities to market more quickly (49%), scale more efficiently (29%), lower costs (17%), while also reducing technology risk. They also mentioned that their budgets will increase, with a large majority - 70% expect their budgets to go up while 29% said they will remain constant. 

Only 1% of CIOs survyed said that they expect their budgets to decrease. 

The top five priority areas that have emerged from the report includes

•  38% cited investments in improving software development and QA lifecycle
•  24% cited enterprise-wide observability solutions
•  21%  picked Data Management and availability
•  10% said it would be cloud and infrastructure
• Remaining cited DevOps and security to be their tech investment priority. 

Also, another key area of investment which reflected in the report was the management of data - its quality (44%), availability (18%), cost of management (18%) and tech & talent to drive data initiatives (20%).

Recruiting and retaining tech talent is confirmed and cited by more one-third CIOs (36%) to be their most pressing challenge, followed by providing a digital experience (35%) and reducing the cost of operations (26%). 

Sunil Gopinath, CEO of Rakuten India,said,“COVID-19 has upended many trends and previous mindsets. While the importance of IT has only grown over the last two decades, the crisis has brought about a sea change in executive mindsets on the role of technology in business. This change is captured in our research with tech decision makers who are investing in technology for competitive advantage or refocusing their entire business around digital technologies,” 

The survey does confirm that CIOs have their hands full with the challenges of finding and retaining tech talent, an achilles heel in the current climate.