Highlighting Next-Gen CIOs | Tech Leaders’ 2021 Priorities | How To Create More Inclusive Teams

Plus: Forbes Cloud Computing Awards 2020: The Joke Startup With $31 Million In Funding

Hi there and happy new year! Welcome to our first newsletter of 2021.

CIOs have set themselves a bunch of priorities for the months ahead, ranging from continuing to support large remote workforces to mining deeper insights from data. We explore these in more detail in a post that’s highlighted in our Strategy & Leadership section below.

Those priorities reflect the fact that tech leaders are becoming ever more central to companies’ success. A new generation of CIOs is rising fast and its members are reshaping the role in fresh and exciting ways.

They are innovation leaders who help develop products and services that wow customers and create new revenue opportunities. They are change agents who build and deploy technology in novel and impactful ways. They are strategic thinkers who work closely with C-suite colleagues to help organizations achieve their goals. And they are talent magnets who recruit and inspire teams that deliver stellar results.

The Forbes CIO Network plans to publish an inaugural CIO Next list later this year that will highlight 50 CIOs who embody this next generation of leaders and we are actively soliciting nominations for it.

Candidates must currently hold the highest tech role in their companies—CIO or its equivalent. They can come from new and emerging companies or from more established businesses. The leaders who end up being featured on the list will be determined based on qualitative research that taps into the expertise of industry watchers and Forbes’ editorial industry knowledge.

You can nominate yourself or someone else by emailing me at mgiles@forbes.com. The deadline to apply is February 5. I really look forward to receiving your suggestions.

Thanks for reading and do please send me your tips, thoughts, questions and ideas for future issues. You can also follow me on Twitter and on LinkedIn. And if you enjoy reading this newsletter please recommend it to others who may find it useful.

Technology & Innovation

Cybersecurity: The ransomware plague shows no signs of easing, with hackers demanding millions of dollars in the form of cryptocurrencies to release compromised machines. Some tech companies, including Microsoft and Citrix, have formed a task force with think tanks and other organizations to help organizations tackle the threat.

Tech outages: Last year, the Forbes CIO Network gave Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield an award for services to remote work. This year didn’t start too well for him, though: As employees returned to their keyboards on January 4, Slack stopped working. It was a stark reminder of the need to check backup plans. “One of the things that’s done...too infrequently is testing,” says Chris Brown, CTO of Uptime Institute, an advisory and training organization focused on IT resilience.

Leadership & Strategy

Cybersecurity: The massive SolarWinds hack continues to make headlines, with more fingers pointing at Russian hackers as the likely perpetrators. The crisis shows why boards urgently need to add more CIOs and other tech-smart executives as directors, not least because the panicked reaction to the attack may have led some IT teams to misconfigure servers.

Leadership: Paige Francis, a Forbes CIO Network contributor and the CIO of the University of Tulsa, shares how grappling with the pandemic has changed priorities for tech leaders over the past year—and why she thinks those changes ought to outlive the crisis.

Talent & Careers

Recruiting: The hiring process has gone digital, thanks in part to the Covid-19 pandemic, and more rapid changes are coming. Some 24% of businesses have begun using AI for their talent needs, with 56% of managers looking to adopt automated technology in the next 12 months, according to a report by payroll and accounting group Sage. Hiring and recruitment are likely to change in multiple ways in 2021 in the light of these trends.

Internships: Telecommuting has become the new norm due to the coronavirus, so it’s no surprise that experts expect that remote internships are here to stay. This virtual climate brings with it numerous challenges for finding and training new talent, particularly graduates. Here are three of the best tactics that leaders should adopt to ensure their remote internship schemes run effectively.

"The Sysco opportunity offers me the chance to leverage a career’s worth of experience in an industry I have a passion for—distribution and supply chain."

Tom Peck

Chief Information and Digital Officer, Sysco Corporation

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