CIOs on the front line in the emergency

SDA Bocconi Insight - Zoom On - by Paolo Pasini

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There’s no doubt about it: information technologies are providing a crucial contribution to managing continuity in the current situation as far as service provision for customers, patients, and people in general and at the same time, ensuring continuity of business, office work, and productive, logistical, and commercial activities.

Today the heads of ICT departments (be they CIOs, CTOs or CSOs) find themselves under tremendous pressure from customers, management, company personnel, commercial partners and suppliers. Obviously the intensity of this pressure depends on how deeply their company is involved in handling products and services that are more or less priority in the current emergency. It’s very high for food retailers, pharmaceutical distributors, banks, producers of personal protective equipment and health care products; lower for producers of luxury goods, machine tools or industrial machinery.