Why C.I.O doesn’t have to stand for “Career Is Over” anymore...

The flood of SaaS delivery management tools that hit the market over the past 10 years came with a promise: to finally fix the failure rates of IT Projects. IT leaders embraced this promise, hoping they would finally have the tools they needed to gain better visibility over their projects. And yet, 10 years later, the numbers are catastrophic: 75% of IT delivery projects are still not delivered on time, on budget or on quality.

The SaaS revolution is turning out to be a curse for IT leaders: the SaaS Delivery Management and Execution Tracking market has become a red ocean of over 300 tools, making it easy and cheap for any team or division within the organisation to adopt any solution they like. Whilst this has been fantastic for helping teams work the way they want to, the fragmentation it has created has been a disaster for IT leaders.

There’s a reason CIO has come to mean ‘Career Is Over’; it is increasingly inhuman for IT Managers to get a comprehensive view of their projects and operations when faced with dozens of different tools that simply don’t talk to each other. They (or more precisely their PM Office) have to run around, manually collecting piles of data to compile into the dreaded monster spreadsheet. With such little visibility, how can we expect projects to be effectively managed?

There is some good news, however. The AI revolution has set the stage for a new paradigm shift: Operational Intelligence. This is the true game changer for managers - a solution that unifies the fragmented chaos of IT operations while maintaining the flexibility that teams have come to enjoy.

During my 25 years working with IT delivery operations of large enterprises, I have learnt that Operational Intelligence can make the SaaS delivery tools’ original promise a reality by taking some weight off IT leaders’ shoulders. These intelligent platforms unify all data from various management solutions and predict risks before they happen so that managers can finally act instead of react. The Operational Intelligence revolution is possible thanks to recent advances in machine learning and AI models which allow us to take IT delivery into a new era of proactiveness and intelligence. IT leaders now have access to cutting-edge intelligence that monitors their operations, anticipates failures and suggests specific actions to mitigate potential failures.

Operational Intelligence is already changing every other part of IT, whether it is infrastructure failure with Splunk or business application failure with AppDynamics. Now it's time for IT delivery management to be changed for the better, and this time for real.

Sebastien ADJIMAN is the Co-founder and CEO of DeepCoding, a Tel Aviv based startup that has built DIP, the first Operational Intelligence platform dedicated to IT delivery. More about it here: www.deepcoding.ai