In today’s Wall Street Journal in the article “Cut Those Costs! (But Not Tech!),” author Ben Worthen writes that the trend among CFO officers (who haven’t had the best reputation among us information technology types) are increasing their approval of IT projects even while they are reducing spending in other areas. In fact, a recent survey of CFOs say that spending on IT projects is expected to go up by 10% over the next year, a significant change from the behavior of just three years ago.
CFOs have come to believe that technology can deliver competitive advantages over their competition:
“The amount of data that businesses collect — or should collect — is growing exponentially. CFOs believe they can get an edge on competitors by investing in new systems that collect, analyze and share all those numbers, everything from traffic patterns on websites to point-of-sale data in stores.”
Not only that they see that lots of new technologies provide ways for employees to be productive while they're away from the office. While this is changing how work has been handled and how employees have been managed, CFOs have come to see that the investments in IT have positive returns.
This is not the only such pro-IT article that has come out recently. In “The hot tech gig of 2022: Data scientist,” in CNNMoney, author Jessi Hempel points out that some applied mathematicians are going to be needed in the marketing and strategy departments in order to make sense of all the data that is going to be coming at businesses:
“Today there are some 400 million devices connected to the Internet, mostly phones and computers. By 2020 some 50 billion devices, from cars to appliances, will be talking to one another. And companies will need teams of data scientists...to sort through everything from internal inventory metrics to customer tweets.”
This is where I feel that I was simply born 30 years too early. Certainly, if I had a solid foundation in mathematics and was trying to figure out what to do in business, it would certainly not be obvious any more that finance would be the way to go. Marketing merits serious consideration. Data mining requires some serious statistical insights and it also puts the data scientist at the center of the strategic and tactical decisions that CxOs have to make every day. It is not a back-office, specialist job far from the front lines of business.
It is on the front lines. And it provides a great way for someone with analytical skills to get exposure to top level executives early in his or her career.
What do you think about these opportunities?
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