According to Workday’s country MD, Kiveshen ‘Kiv’ Moodley, the company is built on innovation, the award aligns with their core values.
It’s just a couple of days before the first-ever CIO Awards on 15 November, and excitement is building up. Workday, one of CIO South Africa’s trusted partners, will present the Digital Innovation Award at the “Oscars of IT”. This award celebrates a CIO who has leveraged emerging technologies to drive innovation and create new business opportunities.
But there’s power in recognising excellence in leveraging emerging technologies and driving innovation – it impacts the IT and business landscapes, Kiv believes. “It is critical to help businesses gain a competitive advantage, which ultimately improves operational efficiency in order for them to be able to drive innovation,” he notes. “By focusing on leveraging technology within the context of industry, domain, and role, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and drive growth.”
Kiv adds that unleashing “people power”, as he puts it, requires technology that is easy, smart and intuitive to support automated systems and tools, all while having fun along the way.
Where does the CIO fit in? There are six main imperatives for CIOs in promoting digital innovation, Kiv explains, and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s business environment:
- Evolving your role to become a strategic orchestrator of digitally-driven business transformations.
- Building your foundation, your architecture, that will support both business resilience and enable rapid innovation.
- Taking all that data that permeates your business and turning it into the insights that will fuel your business initiatives.
- Building and orchestrating an ongoing and engaging employee experience whether fully remote or a hybrid model.
- Running and transforming your business, while staying ahead of new risks, threats, and regulations.
- Continuing to grow the skills and embrace the cultural changes that will build IT agility and excellence.
You are not alone in this journey, Kiv reassures CIOs. Workday is committed to supporting IT leaders across these six imperatives.
“In discussing an architecture for business continuity, we continually invest in our technologies and processes to ensure we deliver the best service at scale,” he says. “An architecture also has to be resilient and agile in the face of change and we call that ‘organisational agility’. We have several feature investments to support this aspect, such as our enhanced business process and organisational frameworks.
“In terms of addressing risks and threats, we continue to make significant investments in security and data privacy, and new innovations are lighting up full new possibilities when combined with data – we will highlight our innovation services and how machine learning is adding immense business value across all Workday solutions,” Kiv concludes.
