The recent pandemic has significantly impacted the way we work. Organizations have had to strategically plan their next few months and years with very little insight on the economic trajectory of their industries. That means cost-savings and efficiency make their way to the forefront of the minds of CIOs and CEOs.
Mark Settle, 7x CIO and author, chats with Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO of Puppet, a leading open source software configuration management company. Wassenaar is uniquely poised for this discussion as she was previously the CIO of New Relic, a cloud-based observability platform that enables consumers to create intuitive software.
In this segment of the CIO Newsletter, Settle and Wassenaar sit down to discuss budgeting priorities in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her counsel to other leaders is to focus their energies on developing better ways of explaining the business value and strategic urgency of the initiatives that they’re proposing. Settle advises leaders to always remember that when it comes to playing the budgeting game, a strong offense is frequently the best defense.
Key Takeaways:
- Wassenaar asserts that the automation of processes and seamless integration across systems is extremely important in your organization.
- Not all changes to your organization can be made at once. Wassenaar postulates that prioritization and collaboration is key. She suggests that CIO’s should be meeting with teams to help prioritize the most important tasks and determine which platforms are your anchor platforms and start from there.
- Due to the increase in remote work, Wassenaar suggests revamping your organization’s security, consider issues that you haven’t thought of yet, analyze video tools and personal devices, and maintain enterprise class security.
- Prior to COVID-19, your organization may have had great tools and platforms for working from the office. Now in this work-from-home era, you may start to see cracks and pain points in your systems, so Wassenaar recommends investing into systems integration.
- In an environment where the pandemic has greatly affected the way we work, Wassenaar posits that it’s critical for CIO’s to help people navigate through these times and account for different types of mindsets and resiliency.
“I think from a skills perspective, it’s really about how you articulate the importance of what needs to happen and why it needs to happen now.” Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO of Puppet
