
CIOs need to strike a balance between stability and flexibility in their IT, says CIOmover Gerd Niehage. Stability is the foundation for companies that are increasingly dependent on a functioning IT infrastructure because it keeps business-critical systems running. Flexibility is at least as important because it gives companies the ability to react quickly to market changes, M&As or new technologies.

The real challenge for CIOs is to reconcile this necessary stability with the equally important agility so that companies can operate both reliably and adaptably. However, systems must not only be stable and flexible, but also resistant to cyber attacks and failovers.
The key to all three requirements lies in an adaptive IT architecture that enables rapid change while being robust enough to reliably support critical business processes. Standardisation of technology by IT on the one hand and processes by the business units on the other is shifting to the data level. This makes integration and insights possible at any time, even in a heterogeneous world, and also enables the use of artificial intelligence.
The possibilities offered by AI play a central role in this. They help to stabilise IT systems by detecting anomalies at an early stage, proactively preventing failures and developing self-learning optimisation strategies. At the same time, AI supports flexibility because it dynamically distributes workloads, automatically scales resources and adapts systems to changing conditions. Finally, its ability to continuously learn from data also ensures resilience by quickly adapting to new threats, load peaks or infrastructure changes.
From the perspective of stable, flexible and resilient IT, it therefore also makes sense to drive forward intelligent data integration, utilise AI for process automation, create semantic interoperability through data standards and continue to pursue hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

