Incredible learning from 2022

It's been a different year of surprises, challenges, learning, and growth in 2022!

As we wave goodbye to #2022, I can confidently say it was a year of surprises for technology! #GreatResignations in 2022 impacted almost every IT Leader and Technology Organization while giving obvious challenges associated with the huge demand for digitisation and cybersecurity.

It's been an incredible journey with plenty of lessons, both on and off the job, from engagements in #e-commerce, #BigData, #cybersecurity etc., associated challenges, and unanticipated events on the professional and personal side leading to dealing with the varied calibre of people. Indeed, It's been a year of tremendous engagement, opportunities and learning.

A few things I have learned during this year worth sharing were:

Hybrid Working – What do you need? Hybrid working offered a mix of challenges on cyber security and good performance needs. Having foresight and visibility on how things are working may help in good preparation to address them before they hamper your work/progress. Farsightedness, continuous learning, and improvements can address possible opportunities for meeting this requirement.

Digitisation with business case: The focus is to support/enable increased growth or reduce operational costs by monitoring the business’s performance. Digitisation should have measurable benefits. Every ROI/business case must be fully aligned with the stakeholders, and having a joint stake in the benefits can ensure guaranteed success. From day 1, see that there is visibility to agreed winning KPIs.

Take risks with preparedness: Calculating risks offers opportunities for corrective action and improvement through learning. Mistakes may happen, and your Plan B can be handy. You can’t take risks putting the business at stake. Review risks with impacts and Plan B to support business. Even if it demands stepping in the shoes of others, use everything (resources, networking, and technologies) to help sail out of a challenging situation.

Multiskilling to address Talent attrition: Talent retention and acquisition was a challenge in 2022; however, ensuring that we have multiskilling agenda to support those situations has helped us sail safely during the tough time. We can’t change external influences, but we can plan and alter internal possibilities, which are in our hands. We focussed on developing each resource with one additional skill. This added the support needed when we did not have critical resources to support operations and new projects. Training, documentation, and creation of SOPs helped the team to look out for no major derailing consistently.

Network– Your networking with IT peers and partners can help you know many new things which they have learnt through their #trials/#POCs. Various engagements with fellow CIOs & Partners during #CIOKlub & various events gave me varied perspectives and opportunities for learning. I learnt about various innovative solutions and have got a chance to try a few of them to improve cybersecurity, improved monitoring and offer innovations to the business. Such periodic engagements were quite helpful in learning from each other's experiences.

Celebrate & Relax - Celebrate what you can. Every small win is exciting enough to motivate those who put x% of effort into it. So, recharge yourself and let your team take small breaks. Remember that each of you is the most important in the Universe.

My best wishes to the wonderful #ITTeam of #PerfettiVanMelle (PVM), #PVM colleagues, #CIOKlub members, partners, and my family for 2023. I am looking forward to another exciting and happening year 2023.